


Sacrifice

by teddybearandlily



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2018-10-18 02:47:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 55,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10607700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teddybearandlily/pseuds/teddybearandlily
Summary: Things change. Rivers widen and ebb, day turns to night, flowers blossom and wither away. Child turns to adult turns to dirt. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There’s only one constant. Harry sacrifices himself, every time.Six times Harry Potter sacrificed himself in the Hunger Games, and one time he didn't.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t written HP fanfic in years. What is this, 2009? But I used to be able to write and I hit a wall for the past few years. I wrote this to prove to myself I still could write. It’s kind of annoying all I can write is still, apparently, Harry Potter fanfiction. But it’s better than nothing so I’ll take it. There are seven chapters and I will be posting a chapter every week. Each is around 7k words. Each chapter is separate from each other. I suppose this is one of those '6 times Harry sacrifices himself and one time he doesn't' fics. 
> 
> The world is that of the Hunger Games, except without any of the people. And there is no magic, but there are phoenixes and Timeturners. Whatever. Who cares about the magic, I care about the angst. I never used to tag my stories years ago so don’t really know how to do it but it’s the Hunger Games universe, so be careful, you should know what to expect. 
> 
> Also I kind of hate how pretentious this is, but it’s fanfic so whatever. 
> 
> Also I literally looked nothing up on HP or THG. I remembered all of this. I have all of this utterly useless information in my brain. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy, and have a nice day. It's apparently 2009 so what the hell: <3 <3 <3

 

**Of Men and Women (a girl is a loaded gun)**

 

* * *

 

Ron can’t volunteer for his sister. He can’t. He just can’t. They’re sixteen for all that Ginny’s only fourteen and he’s going to marry Hermione in two years, when she’s done with school and he’s spent two years down the mines. Hermione's going places, and he’ll follow her anywhere. Ron has a future and he shouldn’t have to sacrifice it to keep his sister. Except the thing is, Ron _can_ volunteer, just not for his sister, and he _will_ , Harry knows. Ladies go first, and Ginny has always scoffed at that, _I’m not a lady_ , and now she's up there standing on the podium, face blazing, head held high, not looking at anyone, and Harry curses the ostensible chivalry too.

Ginny has six older brothers but only one of them young enough to volunteer. Harry looks to the crowd of onlookers, although he knows he will regret it. Sure enough, the Weasley’s are huddling together in a tight bunch, everyone else having instinctively stepped back, leaving a small space around them. Arthur is sobbing, handkerchief out, as Charlie supports him. Bill looks terrifying, downright murderous, as he stares straight ahead, as bold and brave as Ginny on the podium. The resemblance has always been there but Harry has never appreciated it as much as he does at that moment.

Fred and George are as Harry expected, already plotting, heads together and muttering something only the two of them would understand. Harry knows they will never accept their little sister’s fate just as surely as he knows they will fail, in the end. Harry doesn’t know what to expect of Percy. His glasses are slightly askew, something Harry has never seen on the normally neat to a fault man. He stands slightly apart from his family. Percy is the loyal one, Harry knows. Percy is the one who believes, truly believes. Harry has always been slightly amused by his fervent loyalty to the Capitol, has never wondered how far it would stretch until now. Percy’s a loyal supporter, but he’s a Weasley, too – probably gets his loyalty in the first place from his family.

All Harry can concentrate on is the humming energy he can feel to his left, where Ron is standing, but Ginny on the stage doesn’t look worried about him. She knows she can count on Hermione. Hermione looks anguished, but is sensible, ever practical, and she has her hand stretched out to Ron, eyes pleading from across the gap between the Sixth Year girls and boys. Hermione is clever, that’s the thing. The sharpest in the District. Clever in a different way to Ginny, who Hagrid once called a spitfire. Ginny is a spark, burning bright and fast before fading away like she had never been there. Hermione is the low, constant light in the dark, flickering but never extinguishing. Hermione is clever and ambitious and going places. All the way to the Capitol. She'll beat them at their own game. A woman from District 11, a black woman no less. They’ll never expect her, they’ll underestimate her, and by the time they realise it’ll be too late.

Hermione is too modest to say this, what everyone knows. She is clever enough to know grand heroic statements aren’t enough to do anything, in and of themselves. That the battle hasn’t started yet, and that it will be longer and more mundane than anyone could imagine. That women like her will win it, not men like Ron. That Ron getting himself killed is stupid and pointless, and so, so, _so_ futile.

Everyone seems to have forgotten Harry in the moment. It’s a strange feeling, but not unwelcome. Ginny has Ron, and Ron has Hermione, and even Hermione has her parents, who are currently comforting Molly, but Harry has no-one. No-one apart from the Weasley’s or Hermione, anyway. A face flickers into his mind but he pushes it away quickly, used to it after years of practice. He hasn’t seen his godfather in years now, and it’s strange he has come into his head now. Except maybe it does make sense.

Harry knows the aftermath of sacrifice. Sacrifice is flashy and blazing. What comes after is days and nights spent in mourning, and even more days and nights being too tired and hungry to mourn. It’s peacekeepers kicking him out of the Hob, the only place he could sometimes beg a meal, leaving him bleeding out into the snow. It’s growing up on his own, alone. And it’s Molly and Arthur working their fingers to the bone to feed and clothe him as well as their children and never cursing his godfather to his face even though they begged him not to do it. It’s pain and shame and a sense of loss so fierce he sometimes feels as if he is missing a limb. Harry knows what sacrifice does to people. 

Ron can’t. He just can’t. He can’t do that to his family, he can’t do that to Hermione. Harry won’t let him. Ms Umbridge is calling out the boy tribute’s name now anyway, and Harry has no more time to think or decide. He can just act. He was always good at that. Except the name read out stops him momentarily. Malfoy? Did he hear that right? Judging by everyone else’s reactions, he did. One of the District’s elite being picked was certainly uncommon but not entirely unheard of. A Malfoy, though… that was different.

Harry spares a moment to lament that he is volunteering for the only boy in the whole district who probably did deserve to be reaped. He feels guilty about the thought immediately. No, even Draco Malfoy didn’t deserve the kind of painful death he would almost certainly experience at the Games. Although, come to think of it, would his Dad be able to get him out of it, some kind of under the table deal everyone knew occasionally happened in the Games? Did his connections stretch to the Capitol? Judging by Draco’s boasting, they probably did, but the Malfoys _were_ stuck in District 11 like the rest of them after all, so maybe not…

Draco’s mother sobs as his father’s face drains of colour and Harry feels relief, for the first time ever, that his parents are not alive to watch what he is about to do. Harry hates flashy statements of sacrifice, understands their ramifications all too well, but all the same he raises his hand a little and tries desperately not to think of his godfather as he says, ‘I volunteer as tribute,’ firmly. He walks to the stage as Draco sags into his mother’s arms and Hermione holds onto Ron, who looks like he doesn’t understand what has just happened. 

Draco comes to see him, and Harry is not surprised. Harry would visit the person who had saved him from a certain death. Harry has always idly thought Draco incapable of empathy but maybe everything has changed now. Maybe they can move past the stupid feud between them that started when Draco called Ron’s family traitors in Year 3 and Harry punched him?

“My mother made me come,” he says. Maybe not.

“She wanted me to give you this. She said everyone needed a token of their District.” He holds out his hand and in it Harry sees a curious pin. It is of some magical, mythical creature but Harry doesn’t know what it is called. Draco sees his confusion and explains with obvious glee that Harry doesn’t know something he does.

“It’s a phoenix. A kind of bird. Except they’re immortal. Every now and then they set themselves on fire and then come back to life. There used to be a lot of them here, I think.”

Harry feels a weird urge to laugh. He is going to his death and Draco Malfoy is talking to him about birds. Not only that but an apparently immortal bird. 

“Thought your family would be more into snakes,” Harry says. Malfoy looks at him and then speaks quicker, almost as if he doesn’t want anyone to hear him. Harry supposes he is probably the best person to talk to in that case: he will take whatever Malfoy is saying to the grave.

“It was the old fool’s, I think. Mother wouldn’t say but I’m not stupid, his fucking bird is in a cage in our _cellar_ -” He stops suddenly and then continues, “Look, whatever. Just take the pin. It’s not like you have anything else, do you. And don’t think this changes anything. Mother is grateful but me and Father know. You volunteered to save the girl, didn’t you? She’s a Weasley and everyone knows you’re so pathetic you’d do anything for them because you have no proper family. Father isn’t giving you anything. I don’t owe you anything.” With that, Draco sweeps out of the room, not looking back.  

The old fool, Malfoy had said. Harry frowns, not really understanding. He knew who Draco meant by the old fool, most likely. Dumbledore used to be the local headteacher when Harry was really young, although that downplays the power he had once held in their District. He was the last remaining rebel, Harry knows. Everyone knew it but the Capitol had never been able to make the charges stick. It helped that he was seen as harmless, an old man with a stick even at the beginning of the uprising. His weapons were always words, and the Capitol sneered at words, preferring blood. No-one told on him, although somebody in the District must have had the proof the Capitol so dearly wanted. Not like they had told on Harry’s parents.

Dumbledore was viewed with reverence by most. He was their last and greatest link to their past, to the world before the uprising had failed and the Hunger Games put in place. Even the name was twisted against the people. They had named it themselves, was the great irony. In the first few months after the uprising, when there were blockades all over the place, sometimes intentional and sometimes not, when everyone was suffering but there was still hope, people started to call it the hunger game. It was a game they were sure they would win. A game they just had to outlast.

Then they lost and the new regime turned out to be more bloodthirsty than the one before it, and although mostly they weren’t hungry, every year they paid the price of their bread in blood.

Dumbledore had gone crazy in the end. It was a shame, everyone said, such a terrible end for such a great man. He had walked around ranting at the air, insisting to anyone who would listen that _he_ had to be stopped. It wasn’t treason, exactly, because he never specified who _he_ was, and there was genuine debate between neighbours whether he really did mean the Prime Minister or not.

Arthur Weasley had pleaded with him anyway, unsuccessfully, to stop wandering the streets, to go home with him, despite that Arthur could barely feed his kids. The Malfoys were one of the few families to dislike Dumbledore, fear him even. The fact that they apparently had his bird chained up in their cellar was odd, less a surprise to Harry in its callousness than in its specifics. Why would they have his bird, and why would it be chained up? He would expect skeletons in their cellar, weapons, servants chained in a cage even, grotesque villainesque things, not a bird.

He wonders about the bird and the cage and the phoenix pin and Dumbledore, even the certain prospect of near death not tempering his curiosity. He is distracted by the door opening and his best friends entering, Ron crying and Hermione not. “I’m sorry,” he says desperately, not knowing why he feels a sudden impulse to apologise. “I’m really sorry, Ron, but I couldn’t let you volunteer.”

His farewells with his family drive all thoughts of Malfoy and the pin from his mind. He slips it in his pocket while Ron and Hermione cry and tell him he’s an idiot. After Ron and Hermione have gone, after Molly and Arthur have gone, after the crying and hugging and pleading and promising, he thinks about what they all said.

Molly had hugged him fiercely, made him promise not to kill Ginny – I could never, he had said, horrified, and she had dissolved into tears and said she knew but she knew the Games changed you, turned you into something different. Harry supposed she had made Ginny give the same promise, and wished she hadn’t.

Arthur had looked pained, told him it wasn’t his responsibility to look out for Ginny, told him to look after himself. He looked so tortured when he said that, Harry could barely look in his eyes. Arthur had safely raised five boys to adulthood, and here he was losing his youngest two children. They would all give up their lives for Ginny, and she would give up hers for her family, too, but the only one who could now was Harry.

Molly asked him to promise to look after himself too, to stay away from Ginny but to not do anything _stupid_ because this time he didn’t have Ron and Hermione with him to make sure he got home safely. He looked down at the floor and promised. He made them promise in return to look after Ron.

They began to walk away and Harry promised to himself, arms tightly around his knees, that he would send Ginny home to them. They could live the rest of their lives with his loss. So be it. Ron would survive. He had his whole family, _would_ have his whole family. Ron had so much that maybe he would be able to forget Harry, eventually, in a way Harry knew he would never able to forget him.

Ginny comes up to him on the first day of training. She avoided him on the train and although it hurt he thinks he might have done similarly, if Ginny had volunteered. “Hi,” she says softly. “Hey,” he replies. They both start apologising at the same time and then both break off, laughing.

“No, listen, Harry,” Ginny says. “Look, I was pissed on the train, okay, and I think I have a right to be. I’m not defenceless. And it hurts that you thought I was. I’m still angry you volunteered. But I get it. I mean, if you weren’t sitting here, Ron would be. You saved my brother’s life, and I’m grateful, but you don’t have to save mine.”

“Okay,” Harry replies. Ginny gives him a look, but leaves it for now. She says “Allies?” and Harry readily agrees. They go around the various stations. Ginny is small but tough and already knows how to fight. Harry is thin but scrappy and fast. Together, they do all right.

They end the day laying on the mat, panting. “Alright, so as long as you run and I get a midget to fight, we’ll do all right!” Ginny laughs and it’s a moment they will both savour, later. They take the lift together back to their penthouse flat, and without speaking about it, both go into Harry’s room.

He doesn’t know if Ron ever told Ginny about his nightmares, but he guesses she had found out anyway from the way she is looking at him. They sit on his bed, staring out of the ceiling to floor windows, both in silent contemplation, and sleep that night side by side. Ginny wakes before him, and slips away to get ready. She doesn’t talk much at breakfast, and at training is distant.

Harry tries to tease her about her abysmal vegetation identification skills and she breaks the branch in half before stalking off, going to talk with some muscled boy from District 4, Michael Corner, who is over by the pool practicing his already very impressive harpoon shooting skills. 

Harry understands the emotions of the last few days before being thrust into a world where everyone you meet will be trying to kill you, but he doesn’t understand, too. He wasn’t asking Ginny for anything. He wants them to be friends. He wants them to spend their last few days together, their last few days on earth, probably, as friends. Nothing more.

Ginny can’t seem to even look at him. It’s so like the Ginny of a few years ago that it throws him completely, the Ginny who had a huge crush on him and was incapable of hiding it, who hid from him, shy, could barely speak to him. She was just Ron’s little sister. That changed after Harry saved her from some rich man who didn’t understand morality, the word no or the limit of money. They became friends after that. She grew up overnight, grew into the tough woman you had to be in the District to survive.

He doesn’t understand her sudden reticence but he leaves her be. The night before the Games, Harry goes to bed early, tired of the tension and tired of not knowing what to say, and if he should say anything at all. He thinks of things he knows he shouldn’t, his parents and his godfather, and what they would say if they were there.

He doesn’t think of Ginny until she is in his room, the dark night only showing her silhouette and the brightness of her eyes. “You deserve someone to save you, Harry,” she says quietly and Harry doesn’t know how to respond. She kisses him on the forehead, gently, and then leaves. He cries for the first time since the Reaping and then falls into an uneasy sleep, dreaming of phoenixes bursting into flames, turning into the fiery red of Ginny’s hair, screaming for him to save her.

He doesn’t get much of a chance to speak with Ginny in the morning but she smiles at him before he gets into his pod and she is led off to hers, and mouths “Allies?” at him. He nods until she is out of sight. Always allies.

The tube sucks him up and spits him out into the arena. He thinks he is blinded for a second before his eyes get used to all the white. It’s like he’s in a desert, except instead of sand there is snow. He soon realises he really will be blind if he doesn’t find eye protection soon, either because the sun reflecting off the smooth snow will blind him or he’ll be forced to close his eyes to avoid that.

Ginny bounds up to him, having somehow already found snow goggles. She presses a pair to him and together they run away from the battling tributes, away from the small stream and the patch of forest that will hold the only available food and water in the arena. Harry is sure the snow will be poisonous. He never wants to stop running.

It’s not as cold as it should be in that kind of environment, but it is cold. They can’t light a fire or someone will find them, but if they don’t stay warm they’ll die slowly on their own. He wants to scream.

Harry kisses her the second night, and thinks, forgive me, Ron. He knows he’ll never see him again to tell him that but he also doesn’t think Ginny would appreciate somebody asking her brother for permission to kiss her. She doesn’t pull away from the kiss but she looks unsure, eyes piercing and sharp. He apologises and she waves him off, saying it’s fine, it’s just that perhaps this isn’t the time.

They hold each other close when they sleep out of necessity and have even started drinking the snow out of desperation. Harry tried it first while Ginny called him an idiot, but they waited a few hours, or what felt like a few hours, and he was fine, so Ginny has some too, although they are both careful to drink as little as possible.

Days must go by, but because the sun apparently never sets wherever they are, they have no way of knowing how many. Ginny has a rudimentary way of telling but they can’t devote every second to counting time. Harry feels loose, unanchored with no knowledge of night or day. When a polar bear lumbers up behind them, the excitement is almost a relief. Harry feels his brain tightening, kicking into action after days of lethargy.

“Mutant polar bears! Oh, fuck!”

Ginny concurs. “You know what they say,” she yells, as she grabs a stick and begins whacking the polar bear with it. Harry is not convinced of that course of action, as it only seems to make the polar bear angrier.

“See black, fight _back_ ,” she emphasises, striking the bear in the snout. It rears back, regarding them warily. Maybe it’s not a mutant polar bear, maybe it’s just an ordinary bear roused out of slumber by the gamekeepers. Harry has no idea.

“See brown, stay down-” Ginny is trying to poke out the bear’s eyes but it’s too big and moving ever closer.

“See white, good night!” Ginny finishes, breathing heavily. Harry thinks desperately. If only he could conjure fire, that might scare off the bear. But how? He can’t just conjure fire out of thin air! He needs matches or –

“Ginny, give me the stick!” he yells. Ginny is still poking at the bear, but it is clear the stick will need to be transformed somewhat before it will scare off the bear.

“Um, this stick is the only thing standing between us and certain death! Run, Harry! Save yourself!” He’s not sure how serious she is but he knows as soon as he takes as much as a step, the bear will be on him, and Ginny’s stick won’t do much to stop it. 

“Fire, Gin, we need fire,” and she gets it immediately.

“Distract him,” Ginny says and then removes the stick. Harry was underestimating its effect. As soon as Ginny is no longer bothering it, the polar bear rears to its full height. Harry is scared of dying but hasn’t he known that would be the outcome for the past week? Indeed, it _has_ to be the outcome.

He suddenly feels flushed and thinks that his body is releasing endorphins or something to prepare him for dying. He hopes it won’t hurt much. And then the heat becomes unbearable and he looks to Ginny, expecting to see her triumphantly brandishing a lit branch. But she is swearing as she scrabbles on the floor, bent over the snapped in half branch, rubbing the two pieces together. Nothing is happening. The bear is almost upon them. The heat is emanating from his chest.

He looks down and sees his district pin, the phoenix, _glowing_. He touches it on instinct: it doesn’t burn him and in fact feels cool to the touch. He feels as if his fingers brush on feathers and he releases the pin in surprise, but his touch seems to have activated something.

He feels the polar bear’s breath and closes his eyes, waiting for the claws or teeth. Instead he hears Ginny swearing, in awe this time, and he looks up at the sky for some reason. He sees a phoenix, twirling upwards, magnificent and resplendent. The phoenix is burning, brilliant _red_. It screeches at the polar bear, which starts and moves backwards, frightened.

“What the fuck,” Ginny says flatly.

Harry finds his voice. “I didn’t – I don’t know. What happened?”

“The phoenix came from your pin, I saw it.”

“But where do you think it _came_ from?” Harry says, frowning. Did Malfoy know the phoenix pin enclosed a real phoenix? Surely not, he wouldn’t want to help him. But perhaps his mother had known.

“Never mind where it came from! What are we going to do with it? The game keepers will kill it! And then they’ll kill us! What were you _thinking_?” Ginny spits. 

“I didn’t know, Ginny. I didn’t know that was going to happen. Really. Do you think I would have waited for so long with the polar bear before releasing it if I knew we had a phoenix?”

She relaxes a little. “Hell of a place for a phoenix. Hey, you know what? We can use it to melt snow for drinking water.”

Harry wonders at how practical she is. He had been thinking of other things. “I wonder if it has a name,” he says, and he has to laugh at the look at Ginny’s face in response.

She joins in then, shaking her head at him, and they pass a pleasant afternoon politely asking the phoenix to melt snow for them to wash and drink. They are warmer than they have been since the Games started. They can almost forget where they are. They go to sleep warm, not thirsty, and alive.

When Harry wakes up it is still light, and he is cold. The phoenix is gone. He feels a burst of longing and loss. The phoenix was here for such a short time, but he feels his absence keenly, because in this snow hellscape he has only Ginny and nothing else: for a few hours, he had another friend and now he’s gone. 

They argue only once. Harry had questioned her plan of going to look for food down by the patch of thawed snow, where the Careers have their igloos. She sarcastically asks if he plans on winning the Hunger Games by starving to death and tell him if he’s so afraid of killing people he should have stayed at home.

She’s tired and furious, because he didn’t have to be there and she had no choice.

“I’m not a damsel in distress! Fuck off and go have your hero complex somewhere else. You think I can’t survive without you? I never asked you to be here, I never asked you to volunteer. Now I have to worry about you too. You should have stayed home. Looked after Ron. I mean, fuck, Harry. Okay, best case scenario. I don’t die. How the fuck can I go home without you? Did you think about that, hmm? How could you think I would be okay with you _dying_?”

In the end, Harry doesn’t die saving her. He dies saving the little boy from 6, who smiled shyly at his jokes in the training centre and had an older brother at home who didn’t volunteer for him, the bastard.

They hear screams as they make their way to the forest area and Ginny just knows what Harry will do. She puts her hand out to stop him, but catches air in her fist. Stupid idiot who always, always tries to save everyone but himself.

Ginny hopes that the phoenix will appear again but Harry is killed by a machete to the throat before he gets halfway to the boy.

Ginny springs into action, fires the crossbow, aiming at the biggest career, killing him instantly like he had killed Harry. The other two run away. She’s a good shot. In the melee Ginny can only hope the boy manages to get away.

The phoenix stays in the pin, and Ginny feels betrayed. She gets to Harry’s body, tears off the pin. It stays unchanged in her hand. She shoves it into her pocket, resolving never to ask for it again, let it rot in the pin or wherever it was for eternity. Cage the fucking phoenix.

The boy, Aharon, lived, and he didn’t run. Ginny adopts him, for Harry but for herself too. Harry wasn’t the only one with a self-sacrificing streak. She looks after him because Harry can’t and resolves to protect him until there is no-one to protect him from but herself.

Then she will plunge her own dagger into her stomach and he’ll go home and Harry’s sacrifice won’t be for nothing. She won’t go home without Harry, she refuses to. She’ll send the boy home to his older brother and give him another chance to protect him. That is her intention until she fails.

The boy is so scared of her. He apologises over and over for getting Harry killed, for being too slow and weak to save himself. Ginny can barely stand to hear it because he’s alive when Harry is dead but she is endlessly patient.

She’s never been patient before and her steadfastness surprises her. She is strong, she knows, bold and courageous, but she’s never been patient before. The Games brings out the best in her, it is plain for everyone to see, and the viewers respond.

They shower her with gifts, but she hasn’t totally managed to change her inability to hide her true feelings. She is furious at these people, reminded that her sacrifice, and _Harry’s_ sacrifice, is just entertainment to them.

She only keeps the gifts from her district and the boy’s district. She gives him everything from his district, and shares, straight down the middle, everything from hers. She is fair. She is goddamn fair.

It’s not fair when one of the remaining Careers ambushes them when they are sleeping, and shoots the boy in the back as he runs while Ginny stays as a distraction. She had failed to get him to the very end, but she could give him as much of a chance as possible by sacrificing herself. That ends with the boy gasping on the forest floor.

She gapes at the Career, not understanding why he shot the fucking twelve year old and not the girl with the crossbow.

“I’ve got lots of bullets, love,” he says and she snarls “Don’t call me love.”

“Where I come from women don’t disrespect men. But you’re not a woman, are you? You’re a _whore_.”

“Where I come from, if a man talks to a woman like that he ends up dead.” Ginny says, knowing it’s something of a lie. Men in her district call women whores too, call them worse things. It’s the same everywhere, she supposes.

Bill’s girlfriend complains to Ginny about him, sometimes, and Ginny could never really muster up any sympathy. She hadn’t liked men in that way, hadn’t thought of them as that. It was confusing to her when a woman complained about a man, even when her mother complained about her dad’s propensity to leave his dirty socks around their house. They shouldn't be with a man if they didn’t want to deal with them.

Harry confused her. What he did was romantic, wasn’t it? He did it for Ron mostly, but still. Harry had given up his life to save hers, and she should have loved him for it, right? If she was normal, she would have fallen in love with him. She saw the way he looked at her.

She didn’t know if she loved anyone other than her family, but if she could have - in some future that wasn’t possible for her – in some other world, somehow, where her children wouldn’t have a potential death sentence on their heads – if she had time to worry about someone else other than her family – well, she understood Ron’s love dumb ramblings on Hermione’s bright inquisitive eyes, and Fleur was ten times as brave and brilliant as Bill was, despite his scars.

Whatever, Ginny would not die at the hands of this boy who would go home and take and mistreat a wife, or daughters, or _whores_. “What are you?” he gasps in his dying throes and Ginny has never felt as powerful as the moment she answers “I’m a fucking witch, little boy.”

There’s two more Careers to kill, a girl and a boy. She just wants to go home. She doesn’t want to fight any more. She presses on anyway, knowing her family at home will be cheering her on, so close to victory but unable to let themselves dare to hope.

She will go home. They don’t need to worry. She will go home to them and worry about everything else when she is back. Her mother told her that. That nothing, nothing Ginny could do would make her not proud of her. Her mother needs her, her father needs her, her brothers need her. Her district needs her, and so does the whole of fucking Panem.

She has to go home for Harry and Aharon. She can’t let their sacrifice be for nothing. If she doesn’t make it and does die, then she will die knowing she did everything possible to win.

She heads straight for where she assumes the Careers are, tired of running and hiding. The viewers and the gamemakers want a fight: she’ll give them a fight. She’ll pretend she’s fighting the lot of them, the elite in the Capitol, the elite in District 11, the Malfoys who set up this shit and had the arrogance to believe their children would never fight in it. She’ll pretend they’re the enemy she’s hunting and hurting, not two children. She’ll pretend and do what Harry never could, because he chose to be here, chose to be a hero, and she didn’t.

It’s late afternoon by the time she reaches an outcrop where the snow suddenly stops, a clear sign of human interference because there’s no change in altitude or anything else that could have naturally produced it.

There are dark, impenetrable woods on either side, the vast expanse of snow behind her, and in front of her is a sharp drop with giant crabs the size of whales at the bottom, clicking around. She cannot look at them for long. Whatever happens, she is not ending up down there. If she can help it none of them will.

She just wants it to be fast and painless. That is, if it has to happen at all, and she knows it does. She rests, knowing the others will be driven here soon. This is where it is supposed to end. 

It ends quickly. Quickly and painlessly. She thanks God, fervently, that this last wish is granted to her. She hopes. She can’t exactly ask them – they’re dead, after all.

Something burns hot in her pocket. She impatiently pushes the glowing pin further down. She doesn’t want to see the phoenix. Now now, when Harry is dead and she still has blood on her hands.

It’s too late. The phoenix wasn’t there when it really mattered. She knows she shouldn’t even have Harry’s pin but she can’t bring herself to care. She isn’t even curious about it like Harry had been. He had told her of what Malfoy had said, but she hadn’t cared then and she didn’t particularly now. The Malfoys were evil. Of course they had Dumbledore’s bird locked up in their cellar.

Ginny goes home, and Fred is dead.

Her mother couldn’t make it to the station when she arrived in her District; her father was there, unsmiling. Ron and Hermione broke up, during the games, and no-one will tell her when or why.

Hermione leaves, on some fancy scholarship in the Capitol, and Ginny doesn’t even know any more whether she still intends to take them down, but knows it’s too dangerous to ask.

Percy goes to the Capitol too and Ginny doesn’t even have to question his loyalties. She really can’t blame him: she would leave, if she hadn’t fought so hard to return, if she had anywhere else to go. She is glad that at least there is one person she loves that she doesn’t have to look after because he is determined to do it himself.

There’s an investigation into the phoenix pin, but magic isn’t real, Dumbledore is dead, and the fact that the investigation leads back to the Malfoys is politically awkward enough for it to be dropped. She plays the lovestruck teen, pretending she wanted one last remainder of her boyfriend. She tries to give it back to Narcissa Malfoy but she refuses, so the pin stays on Ginny’s mantelpiece in her new house in Victor Village. 

And Fred is dead. He’s dead.

Ron is as awkward about the kiss as she imagined, and she has a sudden urge to laugh because it’s so typically overprotective older brother and she wishes that Harry was there to be on the receiving end of it. Although if he was still alive she wouldn’t keep on kissing him, she thinks. Would she have to pretend if somehow they both survived the Games? Would they be safe, together? She is glad she doesn’t have to find out.

Fred was buried in a landslide the day after she won the Games. He was at the bottom of a cliff on the outskirts of the District, gathering some kind of plant they needed to make exploding celebratory (illegal) fireworks on her return. Ginny knows if she wasn’t in the Games he would still be alive. Worse, if she hadn’t _won_ the Games, Fred wouldn’t have been there at that spot when the earthquake hit…

Her parents and Ron move into the house as her dependents. Her other three brothers aren't allowed but they visit often and Ginny sends them home every time with a cloth full of money and food.

There's never enough to go around the whole District. She spreads it as thinly as possible, telling the shopkeepers to give what they can and charge her later, and vows to never let another child die of starvation.

She doesn't live long enough to learn the Capitol plans to force her to.

Her father does his best, he still takes in strays. They don't really speak of the stray they took in all those years ago, just as George doesn't really speak of Fred. Sometimes, sometimes they'll laugh at a fond memory and that's enough.

Ron takes a local wife. Ginny loves her niece Harriet like she is her own. Ron still goes down the mines despite Ginny's pleading that he doesn't have to. He wants to provide for his own family, and she loves him, but wonders if this pigheadedness is what made Hermione leave.

Ginny gives George money to set up a joke shop, of all things. She’s sceptical it is what the District really needs but it is so patently good for him and the children in the District that she relents. Charlie joins him.

She pays for Bill and Fleur's wedding and they lie shamelessly to the Capitol, claiming everyone in the District knew them, of course they have to have a party the whole District is invited to.

The Capitol sends spies to the wedding and Ginny passes a few hours having fun messing with them. She’s young and fearless and a Victor and they’ve taken all they can from her, she thinks. Then Charlie pulls her onto the dance floor for a spin and she ends up dancing crazily with George, both of them laughing, lighter than they have felt in months.

She starts a slow, tentative friendship with the victor next door, Loony Lovegood. She's crazy, had seen horrors in her battle. Everyone knew she only fought to come home to her father, whose wife had been taken back to the Capitol after a visiting official took a fancy to her. The taken women never came back. And children from District 11 never came back either but Luna did.

Her arena was some kind of enchanted forest with mutated animals at every turn. She somehow managed to tame them. Nobody knew whether that was supposed to be possible or not and the Gamekeeepers maintained afterwards that it was the intended outcome all along. Ginny isn't sure but Luna keeps her mouth shut.

Luna laughs at the polar bear story and is intrigued by the Phoenix. She knew of them but has never seen one. She thinks her mother has. Ginny wants to ask if Luna ever visits her when she has to go to the Capitol but isn't brave enough to ask. Luna takes up carrying the pin around. She is the best with animals of anyone Ginny has met but the pin doesn't light up for her.

Arthur and Luna's father become friends too, sitting around the scrubbed wood table in the Weasley’s bustling house or the Lovegood’s quiet one, silently sharing all that they had lost. And Ginny comes to love Luna, but the time they get together is too short.

Later the rebellion comes again, and it fails, again. They need a figurehead. They need a fucking figurehead, Ginny knows even as she joins with her brothers, Percy included, but the one person she ever knew who could rally an army without even realising it is dead.

He’s dead, and it’s her fault.

She lives with the guilt until she doesn’t, a public execution, side by side with Hermione, and she scoffs, no longer the little girl she had been once on a similar podium, pretending to be brave for her upcoming death: this time she accepts it readily, not suicidal but thinking it is finally, finally her turn to die for herself. She is allowed that grace, in the end. 

Her mother loses her five sons to the battle, and her only daughter too. She would have given herself but somebody needs to look after the babies left behind. Luna dies, too, and the pin is buried with her.

Narcissa Malloy isn't sure what she had hoped would happen after she unleashed Dumbledore’s phoenix from the cage in her cellar, but it's not that. She escapes with her husband’s life but not her son’s, and she lives in gilded luxury in the Capitol, and waits her entire life for someone braver than her to take on the Capitol and win.


	2. II

 

**The Wretched of the Earth**

 

* * *

 

 

 The old woman sings to herself softly as she hangs up her washing.

 

_I wander this land of mud and death_

_Awaiting my final worthless breath_

_For cannonballs cannot drown out_

_The loud silence in which my doubt_

_Takes refuge and tries to hide_

_From the empty talk of glory and pride_

_All round the world you hear them say, the devil’s work is done today._

_And as the vultures peck the dead,_

_I wish that it were me instead._

 

It’s an old folk song. It’s a cautionary tale, she thinks, not that anyone asks her. Nobody ever says it but the song clearly dates back to before the rebellion, before the war and the reconstruction. That means that in the old world there was devastation too. Fields full of dead bodies. Full scale slaughter even, on the same level that had almost destroyed humanity during the Dark Days.

Apparently humans never learn. Whatever cannonballs were has been lost to history and the woman sometimes wonders whether they were better or worse than the Peacekeeper’s machine guns.

The song is a cautionary tale for them, to not go back but to go forward. She’s getting old now, doesn’t think she’ll see a different world in her lifetime. She sometimes wonders whether they even deserve a better world considering what was done to her father, but she always stops these thoughts when she imagines her grandchildren. They’re innocent. They’re innocent and of course they deserve better.

She is a pessimist because of experience, of her long life of knowing better, but she is an optimist because of her will. That’s what her father always wrote to her, and he faced horrors she could not even imagine.

The alarm sounds out as she fixes her cardigan onto the line. The alarm is strictly reserved for the Reaping, and times of emergency. When you hear the alarm and it’s not Reaping day you’re supposed to drop whatever you’re doing and proceed to your designated underground spot.

It only rings in the most terrible of circumstances. It’s a relic of the war, mostly. Back then it was necessary to be able to quickly gather everyone underground because god knows what District 12 were up to, all on their own and with nothing to lose, before they were destroyed. Most have never heard it ring in alarm. She has. It last rang seventy years ago, ten years to the day since the new republic was proclaimed. That was the day a group of survivors living underground launched a last, desperate assault. It was doomed to fail and it did. 

Ten years was a long time. The ivy was growing on the graves of the fallen, people had recovered from the famines, markets were bustling. People just wanted to buy bread for their children.

And it was _only_ ten years too. Any year now the government would realise the pointlessness of killing children and stop the games. The lesson had been learned. Twenty children had been lost and it was enough. The government had to know that. True peace and prosperity would return soon enough, the people believed.

But the uprising came again and it didn’t even matter that this time most of the population weren’t behind it. The Capitol didn’t care. For eternity, they vowed. The Hunger Games would go on for ever and ever. And they lowered the age limit to the age of the youngest child killed by the uprising, a twelve year old girl in District Seven. 

The woman’s father was in prison by then, but he supported it, confined to the prison he would never leave. The rebels were misguided to murderous effect but at least they believed in something, her father thought. The woman didn’t.

She was only a teenager but she still remembered the glassy haze of an old man’s eye as he stared up at nothing. The last rebels had bombed a busy city road in the middle of broad daylight. The alarm rang, but it was too late for too many. In the ensuing panic even more died, trampled.

But the alarm always rings on a Reaping day. On Reaping day when you hear the alarm you go to the town square, and you stand with your group. The woman, unusually, has no group. The Peacekeepers with a frown and a shove make her stand with the lowest group out of spite. She doesn’t mind because that’s where her family are. 

They are all marked by their twisted backs, their short stature, their bloodshot eyes. None of them have made it past forty for a few years now. It is a terrible burden, to bury your family and to keep on doing so. To hold a new baby granddaughter and know she will not live to half your age. 

The groups in the square get progressively healthier, shinier, taller, until the very top group in the District. They’re not allowed to modify themselves unnaturally as in the Capitol, of course, but they are all strong and healthy. Unnaturally healthy. White straight teeth, glossy hair, muscled and strong. No asthma, no glasses required, no genetic diseases. Their genes are perfect.

For District’s 2 honour, a tribute from the top two groups always volunteers. Sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don’t, but either way no-one outside the District gets to see the bulk of its population, much as they only catch glimpses of the other Districts.

The twisted limbs, gnarled skin, the hunched back of a twenty year old. They are disgusting abominations. That is what the higher groups in the District say, even to the woman who is often mistaken as one of them because of her age, and the woman always thinks angrily, _then why did you create them?_ Because they did. She thinks it was by accident but all those who did it are gone now and it doesn’t even matter.

They didn’t mean to create such a diseased population. The woman believes this because it isn’t good for business, and that’s all they cared about, really. Business and their own survival.

Being stronger, disease free, genetically healthy: that is good for business, but it’s not good for business having workers be so warped and genetically twisted that so many of their babies die there is an ever growing baby graveyard full of small white graves with one date on the headstone. The Capitol pays for their burial, even in periods when children drop down dead in the streets and lay there until their bodies are picked clean by _animals_ , and nobody questions it because that’s been the case for as long as they’ve been alive.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. It just did.

They only live at the Capitol’s mercy and at the mercy of the higher groups. Most people assume it is the same in every other district, that there is a genetic elite and a genetic backwater making up the bulk of the population, but the woman knows that isn’t true. Each District has its quirks, and she certainly doesn’t know all of them, but she knows in the other Districts there was no genetic engineering.

The tributes from the outer districts are skinny, hair matted, sharpened by starvation, but they’re healthy, basically. The Capitol probably saw how it turned out in Two and decided not to implement it. She imagines a scientist somewhere back then making notes that the results have not been as planned, and then setting his notepad down and going home to his family, not giving the results of his experiment another thought.

The elite elsewhere share the same genes as the people. She wonders how they rule. If they’re all the same really, how do they convince the population that they’re not?

The woman takes her time putting her washing up before shuffling into her small house to wash her hands, put up her hair and tie a ribbon around her dress. There is no-one she has to worry about waiting at the square this year. It has been years since she knew a genetic superior even as an acquaintance and she won’t recognise the children who end up on the stage as volunteers. As the daughter of a traitor she wasn’t eligible for the first trials, of course.

Her children and grand-children have all grown up. She spent early years standing there in dread, followed by a brief burst of relief. That was a long time ago. By the time her youngest children were old enough to be reaped, the genetically superior had decided only they would take the glory of representing their District.

She was relieved, of course, but the Reaping was one damn day and it took two children. The genetically inferior were spared that day, but the rest of the year they were expected to work in servitude and gratitude for their masters, to give up two-thirds of their crop in return for their children being spared, to bend down in the field tilling every day, to do everything their landlords ask them to do with no questioning or complaining.

Never a moment of rest, never enough left over at the end of year to pay a doctor for the endless problems their genes bring them, never enough to pay for the only school in the District that gives its students a chance out of drudgery and toil.

The constant reminders that it is the elite’s role to fight and give their life for their District and the inferiors’ role to do all of the rest of the work annoy the woman. She thinks she would rather take her chances in dying quick in the games with supposed glory than work day in day out, watching your children go hungry and die a slow death. She thinks. She doesn’t know.

She never went through the Reaping and supposes she can never truly understand what it is like for the children of the non-volunteer Districts. Do they believe in it, the glory and pride, like the volunteers do? As a grandmother, she cannot even imagine.

Soon, there will be no-one left who remembers a world before the genetic revolution. There’s no-one left she can talk to about it. It is unthinkable for most. It’s just the way the world is. Her children all believe it whole heartedly, thank the superiors whenever they meet for their service, for upholding the District’s honour, keeping them all safe. 

Her grandchildren are even worse. They actually bow when they meet a genetic superior in the street, stand aside, eyes lowered, address them with that deferential tone. It makes the woman cringe, seeing her thirty year old grandson bow to children. Well, he used to. He doesn’t get out much anymore, his knee is killing him. Things are getting worse and she can’t stand it.

She arrives at the square, spots her first born son standing at the back of the group. She makes her way over to him.

“Hello, Tony,” she says and when he spots her he smiles. All these years, and they’re what she is proudest of. The two of them are close friends. Tony was one of the last children born before the experiments started.

“Ma!”

She loves him fiercely, loves her other son and daughter just as much. Her grandchildren love her but they are of a different world. They know their place. They understand they will marry a genetic match when they turn eighteen. She didn’t. She fell in love with a boy who thought her superior in every way although his family are now standing on the opposite from her in the square, part of the genetic elite.

Tony never had children, and she never asked why. She stands by him, still steady in her old age, and looks at the stage. It’s the same as it has been for forty years now. It is etched into her memory, the brightness of the stage. Different shades of red and every year it is the most shocking colour she sees in real life.

Dark red for the carpet that covers the stage, orange-red for the carefully coordinated outfits of the local apparatchiks, the blood red of the posters hanging as a backdrop, draped across the wooden stands. It reminds her of the public hangings she used to walk past on her way to school, after the Dark Days.

Most everything in the District is grey. Grey concrete houses, grey factories, grey sky, grey smog. Designated work clothes from the Capitol are light grey, and people spend half their lives in them. Clothes for home are fashioned from the sacks of potatoes sent from the Capitol’s Relief Campaign, and those sacks are dark grey too. The woman dreams in grey. Even the only local wildlife, the pigeons, were grey. The trees weren’t grey but they were all cut down the terrible winter that her husband died. 

The Capitol has taken their colour and gives it back once a year.

Because she arrived so late, and thank God the Peacekeeper on duty was more interested in texting his girlfriend back in One than in her feeble excuses, she has missed the compulsory video relating the story of the Dark Days, the rebellion, the way the war was won, the meaning of the Hunger Games. Shame.

Two bright glossy children volunteer, as ever. There are never any surprises in the Hunger Games. She wonders what the fuck their parents are telling them. They are going to their death, most likely. She always hopes they’re not. Used to participate in District pools to send them a scrap of food or a blanket when they went mad from the cold while her soft-hearted husband was still alive. 

The song she was singing earlier floats into her head… _the empty talk of glory and pride_ … The people before the republic may have screwed up badly enough that they caused all of this but they did know that, at least.                                                       

She keenly watches the other Districts pick their Tributes on the large screens. They stopped showing the crowds years back and the Reaping is standardised across the Districts, but she likes to look for the things they miss or wouldn’t consider to be important. 

The hairstyle of the woman calling the children’s name in District 3 when that hairstyle would be considered horrifically unstylish in her District, the fear on the face of the previous year’s Victor in District 11, the mockingjay pattern on the dress of District 6. Do they know? Her father liked mockingjays, said they hated the Capitol too for what they did to them. Mutated the birds, just like the Capitol later mutated her people. 

She can’t think of a definitive time when she noticed, but the Capitol has been gradually closing off the Districts for decades. 

There’s limited cross-District border trade even. The Capitol do not make an exception for their money and it’s because of this more than anything that the woman knows there’s no chance of things getting better.

She lived near the border with her husband when she was young, and remembers some of the absurdities. District 3 produced electronics and District 2 mined the coltan that went into them. The coltan was transported directly to the electronics manufacturing factories across the heavily guarded border. It was heavily guarded. One night, overnight, the border closed and the coltan was sent to the Capitol and back out to District 3 to be made into electronics products: the few electronics in District 2 had been likewise imported from the Capitol.

The Games is mundane in its own way, but it is also a break from the everyday. She likes to look for patterns. She has picked some up, although she doesn’t know what most of them mean and some she is sure are not intentional.

Like the fact that District 4 always win in years ending in six. That’s an easy to explain coincidence, District 4 win all the time. But there are other things that she cannot believe happen by chance.

They’re all so beautiful. All of the Tributes. So, so beautiful. That can’t be by accident, can it? It’s clear they’re not all volunteers, their cheekbones give that away, but underneath the dirt and despite their emaciated bodies, they all are what the Capitol would call _desirable_. Peacekeepers used to call her that, and she is glad she is no longer a beautiful young woman, and glad her granddaughters never would be. 

This year, the only relevant pattern that she can see is that there should be a volunteer from the non-volunteer districts. She watches for it. By the time they get to District 12, she is convinced she got this one wrong. A volunteer from the outer districts is already stretching belief, but one from District 12? She knows they have never seen a volunteer, ever.

Sure enough, a sobbing frizzy brown haired girl is led up but no-one volunteers for her. Then the boy is called – it’s a stupid name, something _bottom_ – and suddenly there’s a commotion. It can’t – can it be?

Yes, two boys are attempting to volunteer. It’s unprecedented. Even in District 1, 2 and 4, volunteers would never fight over the honour. It would be considered undignified. Agreements are conducted before the Reaping, not during them with fistfights.

The cameras are trained on the boys who are squabbling passionately while Peacekeepers hover, uncertain. She wonders how they are all connected. They don’t look related although the boys look like they know each other. Maybe they both are in love with the girl.

She is happy her pattern has held, anyway. Only one boy was allowed to volunteer in the end. The dark haired boy. She hopes one of the two survive, if it can’t be her District: she thinks they probably will. Volunteers from outer districts’ odds are good, she knows, although she doesn’t know why.

The interviews are on at annoying times this year. There’s some event in the Capitol happening at around the same time and the elite can’t be expected to miss a party. They air in the middle of the day, when most men and women are in the fields picking the vegetables. She’s not, though. Too old. Her bones creak when she bends down and her swollen hands are clumsy. It’s not much of an excuse in an area where people wear out their hip by their 25th birthday but elders from the lower class are respected because there are so few of them.

She puts her pie in the oven and settles down to watch the interviews. She always watches with an open mind. There are no surprises in the Games, in the end, but she has never seen all Tributes as the same, a faceless never ending blur as many adults do.

The Tributes from District One appear on screen looking just like the genetic elite here in Two. Volunteers but it doesn’t help her to know that.

The woman watches in solemn silence as her Tributes are interviewed, as they giggle and twirl and flirt, for all the good it’ll do them. District Three, Four… and now is the hard part as the children from District Five are led out, looking stunned and disorientated to be in front of the flashing lights and the screaming. 

God, and they look younger every year. Hungrier, too, she’s sure. Definitely not volunteers. Skinny and threadbare, hollow eyes. The Careers stay the same every year but in the other Districts things seem to be getting worse. She can’t figure out the Capitol’s plan.

She remembers the early years of the Republic. There were mass shootings and torture chambers, political assassinations, mass graves dug haphazardly on the edges of settlements. Entire neighbourhoods were condemned due to the guilt of individuals and no-one knew who to trust. There were spies in the shadows and public executions of those unlucky enough to be caught. Her father was imprisoned. The founder of the Republic, who Snow is so careful never to mention, who everyone has forgotten about with, who no-one asks what happened to him, spared his life only because they were former – acquaintances. Friends.  

The point is, there was blood in those days. But there was also food. The Capitol sent teams of doctors to provide a rudimentary healthcare system and trained women in rural areas to take over when the doctors left.

They did that not because they cared but because they knew it was essential to control the barely pacified population they had just brutally asserted their authority over. 

She can’t figure out if the famine she can so clearly see in the bones of the outer district’s children is manufactured for some purpose or just allowed to happen because the Capitol simply doesn’t care.

Are they really that secure in their rule? It makes her shiver.

District 12 are skinny this year, too. The volunteer from District 12 stammers in his ridiculous bow tie. He has the stunted look of a child who never had enough to eat.

She thinks perhaps the volunteer won’t win, after all. His name’s Harry and he volunteered to save his best friend Hermione. He blushes when asked if he has a crush on her.

She had just had her interview, hadn’t made much of an impression, small and mousy and with oddly large teeth. Harry isn’t much better but has sharp eyes, looks used to running, used to surviving. You never know. There are never any surprises in the Hunger Games, but it’s a pattern, isn’t it? The volunteer should win. He should. And District 12 hasn’t had any victors in years now. The Capitol will know that. A volunteer winning from District 12. It’s just good TV. It’s just good sense. No matter how many famines the Capitol allows, they care about TV, don’t they?

If she were a betting woman, she’d bet on the boy. Bet on Harry Potter.

The night of the parade she sees a complication. The boy is holding hands tightly with the girl from his District, the one he volunteered for. It’s sweet but she doesn’t think the solidarity will last: once they’re in the arena, he’ll stab her in the back to escape death. They all do.

It is when he punches a Career twice his size who has been cruelly taunting an Avox and only abandons the fight when the girl tugs him away that she revaluates this view. He’s reckless, and brave, and doesn’t seem to care about his own survival. It’s not a good combination in the arena. Wanting to protect those weaker than yourself will only ever end one way. 

Well, his name is out there now. People on the streets in the Capitol will be talking about Harry Potter. Perhaps it is a good thing. Perhaps he knew that.

The Arena this year is mud. Mud everywhere. She thinks the mud used to be fields. There are ruined rubbles of homes dotted randomly around with lethal traps to welcome anyone foolish enough to hope for a respite in the arena. There are tunnels dug into the ground. It rains so the mud never ends. Sometimes the rain turns into spiders mid-air, and when they hit the ground they scuttle away and hide in the dark corners of the tunnels. There are giant carnivorous rats. Skeletal horses. Worst of all, there is poison gas.

It’s as grey as her home is, and she can’t even enjoy the escape from her everyday world that the Games normally provides. At the beginning, when the horn sounded, the Tributes were forced into two groups, opposing each other across the Cornucopia, each trench provided with a machine gun for every Tribute and more bullets than they could possibly expend.

She can’t imagine how people in their worst imaginations could come up with such a fantasy.

Twelve Tributes die on the first day. The Capitol don’t seem to care, so she supposes it was expected. One side, the side Harry and Hermione are on, work together. The boy who volunteered, Harry, emerges as a leader. He’s good at keeping everyone’s spirits up, keeping them trusting each other, laughing together even. They all listen to him, even the Careers who she knows are willing to sit back and let him do the hard work and stab him in the back the minute the other side are vanquished.

Eventually the Careers on the other side – very curious, that the surviving Careers were divided exactly into half – organise themselves into a rigid military hierarchy unlike Harry’s side. It works well enough to stall their advance. A stalemate ensues.

It’s good for betting. Not great for ratings but she supposes it’s a concept piece. The Gamekeepers do those sometimes. Things get desperate. The rats swell in size with the rain and provide some entertainment as the Tributes desperately battle with them.

It is the girl, Hermione, who kills them when she has the bright idea to lead them into a half collapsed trench and dam them in there. Soon, her intelligence and Harry’s leadership are all anyone is talking about, although with half-hearted loyalty because District Two tributes are still alive and fighting in the other trench.

There they are simpler. They use fire to drive the rats out. They almost burn everybody alive too and collapse their trench and the Gamekeepers probably intervene. The military chain of command has not broken down although there is no food.

The Careers in charge confer before announcing the solution. They would humanely put down one Tribute. Many people cannot watch this part, but the woman thinks she will. She is old. She needs to bear witness to the suffering of the young. It’s important, she thinks. She sends her visiting grandchildren off to bed and stays up all night. The Careers don’t care whether somebody volunteers – the promise of a pain free death might just do it – or whether they have to choose.

The other Tributes frantically discuss their strengths. Nobody wants to kill the most obvious choice, a twelve year old girl. The woman is heartened until she realises how skinny she is. Anyway a bullet to the head might be the most humane in the long run. Who knows.

There are debates in the Capitol on what is about to happen. The woman watches two newscasters discussing it, both aghast and disgusted and thinks, _this is what your silly policies lead to_. The Hunger Games.

People are fucking hungry, what did the Capitol expect, that any notions of morality would prevail in the minds of kids who had gone hungry their entire lives and were on the brink of never being hungry again?

They draw straws, in the end. One Tribute had heard of her father doing the same on a doomed fishing trip.

The boy holding the short straw takes a deep breath, but doesn’t try and run, is resolute as he says “You fuckers better aim straight.”

One of the Careers is solemn as she holds her automatic gun to his forehead, and at the last minute the Gamekeepers drop in enough food to last two weeks to both camps. The old woman knows better than most you cannot escape death: the boy is gutted and dies a slow death two days later. 

Eleanor, their female Tribute, who has made it to the last eight, calls Harry a genetic freak, and he looks so confused the woman wants to laugh although it’s really not that funny. She forgets they don’t know, and it seems Eleanor did too. Or maybe she really thought everyone weaker than her was genetically inferior.

Harry was indeed weaker than her but he had just killed two Careers and almost killed her, probably had injured her to the extent that she would be unable to win now. The Careers had ambushed Harry and Hermione and without thinking Harry had ran, drawing them away from Hermione, leaping across a chasm in the earth that was covered with moss. Two of the Careers didn’t notice it in time and Eleanor had stopped so suddenly she broke her leg badly. She will die of infection probably.

It was a clever trick, simple but effective, using what’s already around you to your advantage. She likes how he thinks, no more than is required. She is more like the girl, always needing to do more than what is needed. It’s the kind of thinking that gets you killed in the Arena. There’s no time to think, and no second chances.

She finds out what a cannonball is and wishes she hadn’t, as the camera is dramatically splattered with blood, and its automatic wipers wash off the blood leaving only the memory of the boy who had been strapped to the cannonball before being propelled out into a million pieces.

Harry and Hermione make it to the last four. They do interviews with their families back home although that might be an overstatement. It’s tragic. Both of them are orphans, parents killed in the same mining explosion.

They do have a family in common, the boy who also wanted to volunteer. The Weasley’s all have red hair and look alike. She can only pick out the girl and the youngest boy, their friend. The oldest brother had been killed in the Games eleven years ago. She wonders if that’s part of any patterns. She hadn’t picked up on it before. She’s getting old.

The friend is the most interesting part, anyway. Snub nosed, freckled, wide smile. At least in the pictures they show of him and his friends before. He scowls in his interviews. Says reluctantly that he loves Hermione, and never told her, and it may be too late now. That when he visited Harry after he volunteered, Harry told him he knew Ron loved her and he would send her home to him.

It’s clearly uncomfortable for Ron to admit, but it’s smart too. She doesn’t think he’s that smart and wonders who told him what to say. Not that she questions his devotion to the girl, that’s clear to see to anyone. Interest in Hermione increases further. A love story is what the ordinary people in the Capitol want, not cannibalism and mud. Not even just the Capitol, it’s all the chatter she hears around the District.

She pops into the butchers and gets to talking with the mother of one of her grandchildren’s friend. "Are you watching the Games?" she asks her politely after they had exhausted the topic of the unseasonably cool weather.

The woman lights up. "Am I ever! Oh, we haven’t had this kind of situation in a few years, have we. I stopped watching with all of that horribleness, I could barely see them anyway, but it’s ever so exciting now. I can’t believe she doesn’t know! I want to see her face when she returns."

Their District’s Tributes are gone. Might as well root for the girl with a love story waiting for her back at home.

The boy is brave and clever but he’s lucky too. Very, very lucky. If the girl hadn’t pointed out the chasm before he stepped into it – if that branch hadn’t collapsed on the Career as he crept up behind the two of them as they slept – if his District hadn’t sent him new waterproof glasses so he could actually _see_.

It could have gone so differently at so many junctures. Every time he narrowly escapes death, the woman becomes more convinced that he is meant to win.

On her way home from the greengrocers she passes a group of children collecting money for Harry and Hermione. Probably half of it will go them, if that, but she donates anyway, more than she can afford. She’s an old woman and soon she will have no need for money where she is going. It is strictly forbidden to pass on anything to one’s children other than one set of clothes each and ‘sentimental’ i.e. worthless possessions.

Her grandson bounds up to her one day, his face almost completely obscured by his hair. He has let it grow long and doesn’t seem to have passed a comb through it recently. He also seems to have invited a bird to make a nest in it. She is disapproving. How can his mother let him leave the house like that?

"Julian, comb your hair right now."

"But grandma, everyone is doing it! Harry Potter has hair like this."

She hasn’t thought of Harry in a few days. She is glad he is still alive. She wonders whether Julian will remember Harry after his death. Whether Harry will be the first Tribute Julian sees die.

He’s only eight, but the children on the streets discussing the latest dramatic death in the games seem to be getting younger.

Her children were of Reaping age by the time they saw their first deaths. Reaping age, fair enough, if they are old enough to die in the games, then surely they are old enough to watch it. But _eight_?

“I don’t want you watching it, Julian,” she says brusquely, knowing she won’t be able to stop it if his mother is allowing him, won’t be able to save his childhood, or anyone else’s. 

She wakes up in the middle of the night, her joints too painful to make going back to sleep a likely option, and makes her way slowly, painfully, to the space in her roof. 

There’s barely enough room to sit down but she kneels on the floorboards, dust settling around her, not caring about her white nightgown. She hopes her legs don’t seize up and she has to be rescued but she can’t bring the papers she’s looking at down even in the privacy of her own home in the dead of the night. 

They have been hidden for eighty years now and she intends to bury them with herself. Her father’s papers. He wrote and wrote and wrote in prison. Wrote on anything he could get his hands on when they wouldn’t give him paper, and eventually thin pieces of loose-leaf after they relented. Even as his back became stooped, and his teeth fell out, he wrote.

To his wife, her mother, who forgot him with each passing day. To her, his ten year old daughter, who did not forget him for even one day during the next eighty years. Her mother was scared, she knows. Her husband’s side had lost, pure and simple, and she had to fight for survival instead of a new world. 

But the woman reads her father’s spindly handwriting, sees the declarations of love page after page, years after her mother stopped returning them, and cannot imagine how she could have been so cold.

She isn’t just hiding love letters. Her father also wrote searing criticisms of his old friend, of the Republic, of the Capitol it became. Attacking the idea of a police state, of divided districts and politics based on fear. He didn’t attack the idea of a genetic underclass because he died before it was widely known _that_ was the ultimate goal.

After he died a sympathetic warden smuggled his papers out of the prison to a friend of her father’s. She ended up with them, and by then the mere possession of them would probably have got her a bullet to the head. Her father’s old friend had been killed by his former friends. The Republic lived on but became even more brutal.

She doesn’t know why she has come up here, or what she is looking for. She read his papers over and over in her teenage years, obsessed but unable to discuss them with anyone and especially the person she most wanted to talk to. Then she got married and had children and she never wanted to go back to the loss of her childhood when her husband was around. She was more happy than she could have dreamed of.

Her father’s papers are a marvel. She wishes they could be published. Or, if she’s wishing, she wants him to have never died at such a young age. She is glad, sometimes, that he didn’t live to see the genetic revolution, to see his beloved society be so perverted. He would have been so shocked.

Her father and his friend, the one who he toppled the Empire with and then established the Republic the day before he imprisoned her father, never even _mentioned_ genetics. What happened was inexplicable. Just absolutely inexplicable. 

She is lying in bed on a Wednesday morning, unusually for her. Her joints have been acting up more than usual recently, and she doesn’t have enough firewood to boil water to soften them. Tony has promised to bring some around but she knows he doesn’t have enough for himself and will have trouble convincing his boss for a loan that he will no doubt pay back over and over again before it is declared complete.

The TV is on and she watches it idly, another new development. The programme she is watching on is interrupted suddenly. It’s the Hunger Games. She can’t change the channel, but she can turn the TV off. She doesn’t, though. 

She hasn’t watched it recently, has been too tired. They’re still at four Tributes. Definitely a concept piece, but it looks like it’s ending soon as the camera cuts to District 12. The redheaded boy, she can’t remember his name, stands slight apart in the square, neatly groomed, red-eyed. 

It’s the final fight, she supposes. His eyes blaze and he looks so desperate, so desperately in love. It’s the same look that she saw in her husband’s eyes before he ran into that damn burning building to save the trapped children of their landlord. The children lived but her husband died and all she got for it was a two month respite from paying her tithe. Two years older than her father had been, and still too damn young. 

She had never stopped missing either of them. Her loss wasn’t unique, but it was hers.

The battle is fierce and slow. The male Career made the mistake of engaging Hermione, probably assuming she was the lesser threat and could be easily killed before turning his attention to the boy. She feinted, dodged away, moving with sure steps.

In the meantime, Harry is duelling with the female Career. She can tell he doesn’t want to kill the girl, but then Hermione screams desperately and he thrusts her dagger into his stomach. She falls and the male Career diverts his attention from Hermione towards Harry. The Capitol has disabled the machine guns so they only have their hands.

Except for Hermione picks up a large rock in one last desperate assault as the Career stalks towards Harry with the snarl of a predator on the prowl, not noticing or not caring about the girl behind him, getting closer behind his shoulder. She brings the rock to his skull and the noise it makes as it crushes makes the woman jump. 

It’s just the two of them, then. They gape like they can’t believe it. She hopes she is right about the boy. She is fond of him, and wants him to live but she thinks he wouldn’t be able to live with himself after. Decisions taken to avoid death in the moment have to be lived with afterwards. 

She thinks she is right about him – wouldn’t she kill herself in an instant if it meant her husband could live - but imminent death can make a person do unthinkable things and as she reminds himself, there are never any surprises in the Hunger Games.

“Harry,” the girl says, reaching out and god, does she remind her of herself when she was younger. Harry looks so young and so determined.

“Harry, no! Just hold on a minute! Let’s just think!” she says and the woman knows it’s too late. Whatever plan the girl can come up will be inadequate.

The woman knows it and Harry knows it too. He slits his throat, just like that, a quick flick of the wrist with no hesitation. The girl collapses onto his body. 91st Victor of the Hunger Games.

Two months later it’s the wedding day. The girl is a beautiful bride. President Snow officiates. She spares a thought for the girl. She had to marry Ron, never had a choice after the ratings and the sacrifice.

They’ll be celebrities and children will grow up dreaming of their love story. She hopes it’s what the girl truly wants. 

The woman dies in her old chair before they exchange their vows, neatly and without fuss, like everything she had done throughout her life. Her father’s prison notebooks are buried with her, a waste in every sense.

Everybody in life sacrifices but her father believed it was everyone’s job to minimise that sacrifice. Sacrifice for those weaker than you, not stronger. Spare children and the elderly, spare the workers too. He died dreaming of a better world and she died knowing better.


	3. III

 

**I decided to change the ending**

 

* * *

  

He comes to you in a dream. Your father. He was dead before your second birthday but you know the contours of his face intimately. You look just like him. Everyone always says so, and the pictures and interviews of him that they air every year confirms it. Almost an exact duplicate, except for the eyes. You have your mother’s eyes.

Purple eyes. Every baby’s eyes in District 9 are injected with everlasting coloured ink the day they are born. Your father comes from sub-district 4 and so his eyes are red, while yours are your mother’s purple. Sub-district 1. Although it does not really matter for you because you were born in the Victor’s Village, and there is no colour assigned there.

But by tradition babies take their mother’s colour so you did too. When the dowry was abolished, decried as the relic of an antiquated and barbaric past, the Capitol instituted that rule to mark the change. 

It was because female babies kept dying during a particularly bad period, where work was scarce and food even scarcer. They did not die due to deliberate neglect, but because a son would be able to work in the fields without fearing assault, or earn a wage in the mines to look after his parents in their old age because the Capitol sure as hell would not.

A daughter supposedly was only valuable for her dowry (plenty of women worked in the field, and for a lower share of the crop, but Harry supposed they did not count); would only be sent away at a young age, younger every year, and return home rarely, perhaps for her parents’ funerals. 

Girls kept dying and the Capitol became desperate. It needed bodies, workers, labourers.

The thing about labour is that it reproduces itself – until it doesn’t.

The Capitol searched for solutions. Providing people with free food was absolutely out of the question. The Capitol had no obligation to the people and no interest in any action that suggested they did. It was the people who should be grateful to the Capitol that by its very mercy they were alive in the first place.

Hermione always said the Capitol wanted to make sure famine-induced rebellion never caught flame. There was really no need. The people were so hungry and weak that woman of childbearing age had to be artificially inseminated because they had stopped menstruating, to even make sure that there would be enough workers of any gender in a few years.

But the Capitol took no chances. They did not provide grain, but they did abolish the dowry.

The most progressive thing they ever did, Hermione said disparagingly, and it was to allow boys and girls to starve equally.

The famine passed and moved into memory but the decree stayed in place and the dowry became historical. The last execution for dowry practice, the father first, then the mother, and finally the girl, was before you were even born.

The morning after you dream of your father, Reaping Day, you are unsettled for more than the usual reason. You do not know what it means. You do not really dream of your parents. Or think of them, much. Your family does not like talking about them. 

You know your parents were young when they had you, and young when they died. You know your father’s parents were old and died before you were born. Your mother’s parents died of cold the winter you were three. You live with your mother’s sister, her husband and their son in your father’s house in the Victor’s Village.

Your father won the Hunger Games. He was sixteen, cheeky and bright-eyed. He came back different, that’s what people say. As little as you know about your father, you know nothing about his Games except this, that they changed him forever. He was a mischief maker before, always running around up to no good with his partner in crime, Sirius Black. Your father swaggered and smirked and strutted. He was loud. He was lively. Everyone loved him. He would flirt with young mothers while carrying their heavy bags back from market, sneak little kids piping hot bread rolls from his family’s bakery, accidently blow up the dust piles dumped from the mines then spend five hours sweeping it up after young Molly Prewett yelled at him for getting soot on her washing. When he came back he had changed, but his District still loved him just as much. They love you too, even though you’re small and skinny and quiet, snarky where your father was charming.

He died too soon, and it was such a senseless loss, and everyone always knew it.

You walk to the square with Dudley, trying and mostly failing to act interested in the endless analysis of his most recent fight. You’re not scared for yourself, mostly. You’re scared for Ron and Hermione and Ginny and even Dudley.

You’re most scared for Ron although you don’t know why. It’s just that he is your best friend and what if he is reaped? You had both promised each other as twelve-year olds not to volunteer for each other, both hoping to never be tested on it.

You would anyway and you think Ron probably would too. Thankfully it hasn’t yet happened and you only have three more games to go. And the odds _are_ in your favour because you do not take any tesserae and will not let Ron either, even when he stopped talking to you for five days after you made Arthur take your gold to get through another winter.

You’d be damned if you let them send themselves to their grave out of stubbornness and pride when your bank account in the Capitol is stuffed with your father’s gold.

Two streets from the square Dudley peels away to meet up with his friends. You have never really gotten along with them, although they are polite enough. You suspect it would be different if you were not rich. They treat you like your aunt and uncle treat you. With a very respectful distance.

Your uncle would still be the foreman of the factory if it was not for your parents dying, whereupon your aunt and uncle were cleared to move into the Victor’s Village to look after you. You sometimes think your uncle misses bossing people around and punishing them for their slight misdeeds, but mostly he is content to watch TV and boss Petunia and Dudley around.

He doesn’t tell you to do anything. You don’t have anything in common, with him or with your aunt. It is strange, because she is your mother’s sister and they must have played together as little girls, told each other their deepest secrets in the dead of night. You really cannot imagine it. 

Your mother was summer warmth, always active, restless, hazy. When you remember her, you remember the sun on her hair, making it blaze. You remember her bright green dress, stark against her pale arms. You remember how soft the fabric was against your skin, how safe you felt in your mother’s arms. Your aunt is more like spring, cold even when she smiles, tall and willowy, haughty. When she touches you, it is corrective or accidental and her bones press in deep. Your aunt never mentions her sister.

Your coexistence with your aunt and uncle is uneasy but very simple. You let them use your money (Vernon blusters to his friends as he does not bluster to you: “And we deserve it, really, we have every right to it, we brought the boy up,”’) and they let you ‘waste’ it on the poor of the District.

You think you dislike them, in some undefinable way, but they are your family all the same, the only family you have. You get on better with Dudley. Not like with Ron but that’s different. If you were not cousins you would not be friends, but you are cousins so you are friends. He is more like a brother, you suppose. He is just always there and if he suddenly wasn’t you would feel his absence keenly.

Dudley is your family by blood and Ron by choice, so it is different.

You trudge the remaining distance to the square alone, kicking the stones and scuffing your brand new shoes as you always do. Something about this walk makes you feel twelve years old again, every year. You were so scared that year, because everyone had made such a big thing of a victor’s son being eligible. But when nothing happened and you weren’t reaped as Hermione had so assuredly said you would not be, the fear went away. 

This year you’re sixteen. The same age as your father when he was reaped.

You’ve been trying not to think about it.

It’s harder when you get to the square finally, see the rows of children. You make your way to where Ron is standing. Neville is on his other side, nervously shuffling from one foot to the other, beads of sweat at his temple.

Focusing on other people has always been your way of distracting yourself from your own fear. You ask Neville about his garden and he relaxes a little, and tells you about his perennials. You’ve killed every plant you’ve ever been sent, which you feel is quite an achievement considering they’re fancy supposedly foolproof Capitol plants engineered in high tech greenhouses.

Like everything the Capitol produces, they’re supposed to be hardy, but you killed them somehow.

Neville relaxes talking about his plants, even smiles a little when he describes one lonely brave sunflower surviving without any sun, and his smile makes you feel better in turn. Ron doesn’t join in, which isn’t like him. Normally he would be amicably teasing Neville and reminding you of what a plant murderer you are. You look at him and see he is totally fixated on the stage. You look at what he is focusing on so single-mindedly and gasp, which Neville takes as sheer surprise that his begonias survived the hard frost, nodding with shining eyes.

The announcer up on the stage is Percy. You’re surprised but only because Ron hasn’t told you of any promotion recently. You have always known of Percy’s ambition. He is not the only person you know who would defend the Capitol but he is the only one who sounded like he really believed it. You stifle a laugh, and try to catch Ron’s eyes, wanting to share your amusement at how overstated and pompous Percy is sure to be. When you look over, Ron’s eyes are locked on the stage, on Percy, but he’s not smiling. He looks furious. Ron has a habit of diverting his emotions onto the nearest person, which is generally you, so you know better than to say anything. You look at the ground instead. Perhaps Percy standing up there isn’t so funny.

Percy begins at exactly eleven o’clock. He clears his mouth and speaks so deliberately he sounds like he has been told a man would be shot for every word he gets out. You wonder how old he was, exactly, when he began practicing this speech in front of the mirror, the bathroom mirror you know so well, the one with the toothpaste stains splattered across it that don’t come out and the teddy bear sticker Bill stuck on when he was a toddler. You’ve looked into that mirror and never felt anything but safe and loved. You cannot imagine this speech in that house. You hope, as desperately as you’ve ever hoped anything, that Percy does not have to read out one of his sibling’s name because you know his voice wouldn’t falter. He would say it in the same proud voice he says anything nowadays, ever since the Capitol accepted him onto their _Leaders of the Future_ programme, and that would kill Arthur.

You never do get to hear what name Percy reads. There is a strange sound before he picks the girl tribute. It sounds mechanical and is so loud you cannot believe even Percy would continue reading his speech. Ron too can be incredibly deaf when he is fixated on something so you look to Neville and find him apparently unstartled by the noise, continuing to fearfully stare at the reaping ball.

You look for Hermione, the one person you can always count on to be one step ahead of you. It is only when you see her unblinking gaze that you feel fear.

The noise has stopped but the air around you seems to be stretching, like it sometimes does in the height of summer, even though there is no sun today. You blink slowly, trying to see if it really is something or if your eyes are deceiving you.

You blink and when you open your eyes you are in a different crowd in the same square.

The wooden stage is the same but the man standing on it is no longer Percy. He is squatter, balder, older. The reaping ball is solid brass, not sleek diamond edged glass. Everyone looks slightly pinched, and you immediately think _famine year_ , but it hasn’t been a famine year for five years.

Ron and Neville are both gone, replaced by boys you’re sure you’ve never seen before in your life. One looks as if he could be the butcher’s son, but you know the butcher only has two daughters. He catches you gawping at him, smiles and says “All right, James?”

James. Who’s James? 

Your father was called James.

Thankfully the boy – not the butcher, you think, _not_ the butcher – continues straight away. 

“Where’s Sirius? Not like you two to be apart.”

Just as he says that a black haired boy pushes his way through the crowd towards you, scowling.

“ _There_ you are! I couldn’t find you anywhere. You were supposed to meet me at the lamppost, where were you?”

You’re saved from having to answer by the chiming bells, signalling everyone to fall silent and stand to attention as the anthem blares. 

Sirius pays no mind to this rule, leaning over to continue hissing at you.

“– and you _know_ Moony is ‘ill’ and the fucking Mayor –”

A Peacekeepers yells at him, and you jump, startled. You’ve never, ever, made a Peacekeeper shout at you before. Sirius looks like he couldn’t care less about the Peacekeeper but his expression turns quizzical when you startle.

“We’ll talk about it tonight,” he murmurs and you are thankful when he falls silent for the rest of the anthem and into the speeches. You’ve missed the beginning announcement, when they announce the year of the reaping.

You don’t know who Moony is, why it sounds like he isn’t actually ill, why Sirius is so upset with you. What you have done or haven’t done. You are completely, totally lost.

Could you be lost in the _past_? Your father’s best friend was called Sirius. Your father whose name was James. The butcher as a young boy, his daughters who are about your age… 

You are so lost in your head, trying to work out what is happening, whether this is perhaps a dream like you had last night, that you do not even notice when the speeches draw to a close and the girl tribute is called. 

There is not even time to be scared for your mother, which would be ridiculous anyway because you know she wasn’t reaped – Hang on.

You remember a second before they call your father’s name.

Your reaction is similar to Sirius’s and it would be funny except it is not. You have never seen a human look so positively wild. He looks like he is about to grab you and start running, and never stop. 

You know that would not end in glory, in a dramatic escape, camping in the woods together and fishing and foraging for your tea, climbing sun-dappled trees and relaxing in the quiet and building dens.

Even if you did make it, you would starve. It would be a drawn out Hunger Games, without the cameras.

But you wouldn’t make it. They would shoot you before you could leave the square, leave your bullet ridden corpses to brown in the sun before the twelve year olds. Some other boy would be called and who knows what would happen to your real father. Who knows what happen in the future. 

You think Sirius knows all of this, apart from the stuff about the future. You know you probably only have seconds before Sirius volunteers for you.

You also know that you, or your father, _wins_. You have to be the Tribute, it is what the future holds.

 “Sirius –” you start and you cannot say anything more. Because you would volunteer for Ron, and nothing could stop you.

You look to the boy who becomes the kindly butcher instead, and hope he reads your expression correctly. You make your way up to the stage, and do not look back, while behind you strong arms hold Sirius in place, an arm wrapped around his mouth to prevent him from screaming out.

You are glad you have to focus on Sirius in that moment, because you cannot bear to focus on your own situation.

You stand on the stage, not able to focus on anything but your own beating heart.

It is impossible. There is no such thing as time travel. There is no such thing as magic.

All you can think is that if you are here then where is your father? You search for your mother in the crowd desperately, a flash of red hair. You are illogically expecting her to be wearing the green dress you remember so well.

You do not find her and too soon you are led down from the high vantage point, back to the ground, where you cannot see anyone.

In all of your confusion you forget about the goodbyes. They put you in a room, locking it behind you, and you panic for a moment before remembering. You have always been practical so you are more nervous for the impending goodbyes with your loved ones than for the distant Arena. 

James’s family and friends knew James better than you ever did. You have his face, that’s all. They will surely be able to tell you are not him.

And then what will happen to you? There will be no trace of you in any system, in any document, and the Capitol will take that to mean you are a level one threat. They will almost certainly imprison you, maybe they will kill you. You wonder for a second if death would take you back to your own time but you cannot risk it. Surely death is still death, even if you are not sure of anything else. 

Your grandparents come first. They are alive and kind. So, so kind. They remind you of Arthur and there is a hard pain in your chest at that.

Arthur was the only father you ever knew, really. You wish he was here. He would know what to do, and even if he didn’t he would tell you he would take care of it, not to worry. You and Ron never accepted it when he told you this before. You did worry about him, his greying and thinning hair, the stress of his job and the stress of his children, the stress of raising them alone.

You tried to take care of yourself and him. He always saw so much more in you than your money. He would tell you and Ron it wasn’t your responsibility, and you never listened, but you think you would now. Having to pretend to be your own father to his parents when you know that all of them are dead – it’s too much.

Your grandparents are so distraught, so lost in their own grief, they do not notice anything strange about you or if they do, they don’t mention it, chalking it up to the reaping. You so want to tell them that you win, that you come home. That they live to see it but not much longer. You do not know if that would be heartening or not. But you do not say a word, because you cannot force anything out.

Your father came back different, everyone always said. What if he came back different because he _was_ different, was…you? 

But why do you not remember any of this? Your brain ties itself in knots and you give into it. You are drained by the goodbye with your grandparents. They said they loved you, over and over, holding you close, but you took no comfort in it because they do not love you, they love your father. They never knew you. 

Lily does not come, and you do not know if you are glad or disappointed. You do not know if it would be better to have any memories with her, even one of her saying goodbye to what she thinks is a dead man, or none at all as you currently have. 

But you don’t think you could pretend not to be her son. 

The door flies open with a loud bang, and your head snaps up. You do not know how much more you can take.

It’s Sirius. His eyes are red and wild, his face flushed. You do not know what to expect. Tears and hugs? Or companionable silence?

Instead he opens his mouth and screams at you, “Fuck you, James! Fuck you. Always the fucking hero.”

He runs out of steam suddenly and stands there, tense, arms coiled, as if at any moment he will bolt. You do not say anything. You’re confused. It is not like you volunteered. You were reaped. You don’t understand how Sirius can possibly construe the situation to you wanting to be a _hero_.

You do not know Sirius at all. You think of what you would say to Ron in the same situation. You do not know your father at all either, but you have always been direct.

“I couldn’t let you die for me,” you say and Sirius relaxes just a little, coming to settle heavily by your side, knees drawn up, staring straight ahead, ignoring your curious stare.

Sirius sits with you and talks. You’re happy to listen because you suddenly feel like you will never say another word again; happy to sit and hear about a man you never knew, the man you so happily grew up in the shadow of. You never felt like you had to live up to your father’s legacy. You were always happy to just be you, Harry Potter. You never wanted this. 

You cannot speak, so Sirius talks, but the words are torn out of you after Sirius sighs and says “The house will be so weird without you in it.” 

“What?” you say stupidly. You are not particularly eloquent, never have been.

“Yeah. It’ll be so quiet. God, James. Come home. Please come home.”

“You live… with Dad? I mean, my parents?”

“Yeah, since last summer,” Sirius says quietly, lost in thought. You never knew. How would you? 

The Capitol shot him twenty two days after your parents died, shot him because he would shut up about how the Capitol killed them, killed Lily and James. 

There are still pictures of him all over your parent’s house, next to the procession of Dudley growing up. Always smiling. Always slightly blurred, like he had been moving and couldn’t bear to stand still even for a moment, like the photo frame couldn’t hold him, restless, active, young. Never looking lost for words, like he does right now. 

At the end the Peacekeepers drag Sirius out of the room because he refuses to move. You stand shakily and tell him to look after your parents. He nods, the tears falling down his face, and you desperately try to stop imagining Ron crying as he says goodbye to you forever. What he thinks will be forever. You do not want to experience the Hunger Games but you want the eventual reunion with Sirius.

The fifteen minutes allocated for goodbyes has expired, you know by the Peacekeepers’ action with Sirius. You are grateful but you do feel very, very alone. You do not want anyone there but you do not want to be by yourself.

Dumbledore arrives, walking slowly but surely through the shiny oak doors. You straighten your back, feel faintly embarrassed about your tears.                                                                                                                              

“Potter,” he says. You do not know how to reply. You are a Potter but you are not your father.

“I was having a weird conversation with myself last night,” Dumbledore continues. 

“Oh, really, sir?” you say politely. Some students think he is a doddery old fool but you have always liked him. He says you do not understand. You think you will understand them when you are older, but it has not happened yet.

He tells you stories about your parents, sometimes, and he always has such a sad expression that satisfies something deep within you, because it is proof beyond yourself that your parents had lived and been loved, by someone other than you.

“James,” he says but he says it like a question and you do not understand what answer he is looking for.

“Um – that’s – I – um.” you stammer. Does he know? You always thought Dumbledore knew everything.

“My future self was under the impression that he had met James Potter that night.”

“That’s impossible, sir.”

“Indeed. You look just like your father.”

“Except for the eyes,” you say because you cannot help yourself.

Dumbledore smiles and you relax. “So tell me, Harry Potter,” he says lightly. “How on earth did you come to this time?” 

“I don’t know, sir!” you say, desperately wanting him to believe you. You really do not know.

“It wasn’t deliberate, then? I know your father is very brave. As soon as I heard he married Lily Evans and had a child… I admit, I thought you had come back on purpose, to try and save your father. James is brave and if there’s anyone clever enough to pull off time travel it would be Lily – or her son.” 

You do not know how to feel that Dumbledore thinks this of you because you are Lily Evan’s son. You do not know this Dumbledore, but he feels like he knows you, as some perfect amalgamation of your parents. 

He continues. “I was gratified to find out my future self is a far more intelligent man than I am. Even those of us who work in schools, perhaps especially us, tend to forget the importance of constant learning. It seemed your father found himself in your time, at the Reaping, and thankfully bumped into me, me in the future that is, before much time had passed. James swore he had nothing to do with the swap; I believed him then, so I do now too. James was not reaped, or should I say _you_ were not reaped. James will pretend to be you, I did not seem to think your family would know it was not you. I daresay some of your friends will figure it out but they are distracted, or I thought that at any rate. I will talk to them, it may be necessary to let them know from the beginning which complicates things, of course. And as for you – that’s trickier.”

He pauses, but you have nothing to say.

“Harry, I told myself that James – you – won the Games, I’m sure you already know. I did not tell myself how. I seemed to think that was too dangerous, because it could cause you to change something, even something tiny, and you wouldn’t win. You need to win, so you can go home. We think. He thinks. I wasn’t sure but I thought you might switch back around at the conclusion. My future self travelled through time to tell me this last night, but he cannot be accompanied by other people, he was very clear of this. Your father made him try despite my warnings and was seriously electrocuted. He was… _reluctant_ to tell me many details of what he does know about time travel.” 

You are privately glad Dumbledore is just as mysterious to himself as he is to everyone else. He can see how it feels.

“Who was reaped?” you say immediately, rudely. “Sir?”

“I do not know, Harry. I’m sorry. I did not see that as pertinent information to tell myself." 

“But – my friends. Ron.” 

Dumbledore does not say anything for a moment and then says, “You must think me a cruel man. Educating the generations and accepting the sacrifice in return for the minds of all the other students. Not doing anything when every year there are two empty stools. Forsaking the one for the many.”

You have never particularly thought he is cruel. Everyone knows there is nothing he, or anyone, can do. You do not really think anything of him, right now. All you can think about is your friends, and Dudley. Aunt Petunia has lost all of her family, she cannot lose him too. Anything you do say to Dumbledore would sound rude, even if you do not mean to be, so you say nothing.

Dumbledore’s eyes at once look keen, like you are the only thing he is focusing on, and far away, as if he cannot see you at all.

“Tell me, Harry,” he says. “Say the world was much like it is today, except instead of picking twelve children every year there is only one, forever. The child would be tortured, for all of eternity, wretched, ridden with pain, and only pain, understanding nothing else: it would never know any better. Would you accept such a state of affairs?”

You do not hesitate. “No,” you say, softly. “I would not consent.”

He smiles, sadly, fondly. He gathers his things to go, and you do not move to stop him. He has done his job: he has educated you, told you everything he knows about what has happened to you. How could you expect more?

“Sir, my eyes!” you suddenly burst out, in a panic, forgetting decorum. You got away with the goodbyes but surely people in a less emotional state will notice.

Dumbledore scrutinises you. “Don’t worry, Harry. People have a way of making things make sense, when they cannot face the truth.”

You are silent.

“One last thing. I am sorry to ask, Harry, to put such an unfair burden on you, but often the greatest of us are forced to carry the greatest burdens. You cannot tell anyone that you are you are from the future. I must impress upon you the importance of this. The consequences if you do are graver than you can possibly imagine.”

“What are they, sir?” you ask, wide-eyed.

The sad smile is back. “If you do not win the Games, if even anything, the slightest thing, is not what it should be, you will never be born. It will be like you never existed at all.”

He puts a hand to your face. He does not say anything, just stares at you. He turns to leave and you suddenly want to beg him not to, clutch at his robes, unedifying, pathetic, childish.

You do not, just watch with tired unblinking eyes as he walks out of the room and closes the heavy door behind him. Your mind is so muddled you let yourself be led, limp, onto the train, into your room, falling onto the bed and staring blankly at the ceiling for what feels like hours, although you know by the dwindling light it can only be twenty or so minutes, before falling asleep. 

The next day you feel better, the new day scrubbing the slate clear. You feel more yourself, although you wryly note that that is not particularly a good thing when you have to pretend to be your father.

Something comes back to you that was not quite right but you had no energy to dwell on it previously. The whole day was so wrong you did not notice it earlier.

Your grandparents were not old. Not like you had always been told. In fact, that was almost all you knew about them: they were old when they had James and they died peacefully, naturally, of old age before you were even born. But the couple in front of you were not old. They weren’t young, exactly, but they weren’t old. You took old to mean grey hair, wrinkles, stiff knees. Harry cannot understand why his grandparents died so young too, why they couldn’t look after him.

What _happened_?

It does not make any sense, why people would lie about something so innocuous.

You cannot stop thinking about Dumbledore’s tortured child. 

You are alone a lot of the time. Your mentor is on some important business in the Capitol and will meet you there when you arrive. The girl tribute is terrified of you. You think, unhappily, your father must have teased her because she looks at you like Neville does at his tormentors. You cannot dwell on it, it is better she is scared of you. You are glad there is nothing between you, no bonds. You will do your best to stay out of her way, and you are glad she will do the same.

Your escort is fond of her and they spend a lot of time together. You know you are missing out on important information, but cannot bring yourself to care. You know you win. You do not let yourself think, what if I only win because I make an effort and go and join their conversations… God gave the drowning man three chances, right?

The loneliness is comforting because when you are alone you can be yourself, do not have to worry about whether your father would have done that or said that. But in the spaces and gaps your mind conjures up the worst questions, a whole inquisition, replays Dumbledore’s question over and over, and your answer.  

At your interview, all you can think about is your goddamned eyes. You wear glasses so you resolve to blame it on a weird refraction of light on the glass. You do not really know what refraction is so hope no-one pushes you on it. Surely refraction is boring, too boring for the Capitol, for the Hunger Games. You hope.

In the end, nobody even comments on it, just as Dumbledore said. You are so fixated on your eyes that at first you mumble your answers. The audience stares impassively. You hope your grandparents are not watching, but know they are. They must have no hope now. You know Sirius will not be watching.

Your father was charming, he laughed in his interviews, he dazzled the crowds… you know this, you have seen the recordings, repeated every year.

You make more of an effort, forget your eyes, make eye contact with the interviewer, with the camera, staring out intently into the cavernous space. The lights are so bright you cannot make individual eye contact with a single audience member, and this helps you to make eye contact with them all. You force a smile onto your face. You are good at making people like you. You had forgotten that. 

You forget yourself only once. The interviewer asks who you want to go home to and you say “My parents.” That has always been true.

The interviewers asks something about your father and you start ‘Yeah, it’s crazy my father –” before remembering.

The interviewer prompts you, “Your father what?” and you manage to get out “My father,” before your eyes fill with tears and you cannot go on. Oh god, your father.

You are embarrassed but the interviewer is leaning forward in his seat and the silence in the hall gets sharper. They are sorry for you, but you are not pathetic. Somehow you accidently reached this happy medium. You plaster the smile on again, and are calm, kind, balanced, clever, funny, throughout the rest of your interview. A solid chance, if not a clear frontrunner. You get strong applause.

You do not even realise you mentioned your mother until your escort is in front of you, angrily gesturing. After the roar of the crowd it takes a moment for you to focus on her and hear what she is saying. She is saying your mother’s name.

The interviewer had asked if you had any girl back home. You blush, and say no, thinking of Ginny, so he asks about any unrequited love.

You say it without thinking: “Lily Evans.”

Surely everyone in your District knows you love Lily. Surely it would be suspicious if you did not mention her. The interviewer does not react like you said anything wrong, “Well, let’s hope you go home to her!”

Annabella, your district’s escort, is looking at you like you have done something unfathomable. You are worried, struck by blind terror, that you said something revealing, that she knows you are not really James, that they all know, but had to wait until after the cameras are off you…

What Annabella says confuses you. “You _love_ Lily Evans,” she says and it’s not a question because she obviously doesn’t believe you. You are so sick of not knowing what to say in fear of revealing yourself, and so relieved that she does not appear to already know, so you just open your mouth and close it again.

Annabella repeats herself. “ _You_ love Lily Evans.”

“I – yes.”

Annabella looks angry then. “Is this all just a game to you, James?’

You’re spiteful enough to think, it’s _your_ game.

“Why would you say that? Are you really so pissed that she won’t go out with you that you have to drag her into this? How is she supposed to feel about you saying you love her to an audience of _millions_ and then watching you die? You should have left her out of this, James, it’s not fair.”

“She’s my friend,” you say desperately. What is she talking about? She clearly doesn’t know your father or mother very well. 

Annabella laughs. “Lily isn’t your friend! She _hates_ you. Everyone knows that.” 

For a second, you forget everything. Forget the Games, time travel, forget death, even. You conceal your emotions too late.

Annabella looks confused. She does not understand why you are so upset. You wish you were more like your father. You have never minded before this moment that he was more devious than you, cleverer, quicker thinking, able to talk himself out of any situation.

If you were James Annabella would not be looking at you with pity.

You excuse yourself and go to your bedroom. You did not bother opening the curtains in the morning so the room is dark. It is spotless, and you feel like ripping apart the perfectly made bed, knocking the lamp off the side table, smashing the large TV that hangs on the wall opposite the bed. You do not, because someone else would have to clean it up, and you have always tried to make life easier for people. Your father did too. He would sacrifice anything for Lily, for anyone.

Your father was a good man. 

Your mother… your mother hated your father? What changed? Did she only love him for his money, because he was a Victor? You think of Petunia, of what women have to do in hard times, and feel sick.

You force yourself to stop thinking about it, because it is not helping you. Your mind allows you that reprieve at the cost of thinking about what Dumbledore said.

You lie awake the night before Training, thinking about the tortured sacrifice, not knowing if you are that sacrifice or the one wielding the knife, instead.

Perhaps. Maybe. If you could be the sacrifice, maybe you would consent. If you could be sure you would be the one in pain forever, maybe you would accept it, to save everyone you loved. 

At least then you would not have to kill anyone else in order to survive.

But how could you be sure it would be you? You suspect you would not get a choice.

In this world, it is you. At least you know that for sure.

Training goes by fast. You discover you are hopeless at starting fires, okay at throwing javelins, better still at catching fishes in the slippery rivers with your hands. You can climb a tree faster than anyone and you have stamina when running. You begin to hope. At least, you can make sure your friends do not worry about you. You’re getting confused again. You are James here, not Harry, there are no Ron and Hermione watching at home. Only Sirius. And the mysterious Moony, you suppose.

You have a shadow.

You first notice him when you are eating lunch, spooning soup into your mouth so fast you are burning your tongue raw. There is a whoosh of air at your neck, and an unsettling feeling of being watched. You got used to the cameras a few days ago so you look around but there is nothing out of place, no-one watching you, at least not until the other Tributes notice you conspicuously craning your head. 

You are eating alone, because you cannot bear the thought of having to be friendly with people who will be trying to kill you. 

There is a shape at the corner of your eyeline as you walk from the lunch tables back to the training booths. It annoys you, unsettles you, and you are unsettled enough already.

You mess up the plant identification, wishing Neville was there to help you. You want to do something physical to get rid of your restless energy, to tire your muscles, your whirring brain. You want to get rope burn, aching muscles, cuts on your hands. You do not care about your body for the arena. The knowledge that you will win is a terrible burden, and it has made you reckless.

At the high ropes that afternoon, you are sweaty, tangled up, frustrated with your knots for not holding. You can feel someone in front of you as fiddle with your waist, and you know it is the shadow. A deft hand takes the particular knot you have been struggling with, takes it apart, loops it around the correct bracket, so fast the rope is a blur to you. You look up, mouth open in surprise. A short sandy haired boy is in front of you, grinning widely. His grin is so out of place you are immediately suspicious. 

You are normally kind and generous, willing to trust. You do not suspect the worst of everyone, like Ron does. You are less dispassionate than Hermione. You look just like your father, they all say, but you do not act like him.

The Games changed your father, and you understand now. The boy’s wide eyes are so suspicious; everyone knows there are no true friendships in the Games. They lead you on and stab you in the back one night. Harry already has friends and he needs to go home to them.

His name is Colin. He’s only a year and three months younger than you but he seems much younger than that. You spend only the afternoon with him before you know you will be great friends. He is funny, always encouraging. He does not get frustrated with himself or you when you both mess up at stealth training. He’s fast too, but gets distracted easily, and is too loud, too clumsy on his feet.

He reminds you, in some way, of Dudley. The same fond exasperation you feel for him, the inexplicable need to protect, even when Dudley is six feet of muscle and you have to kill this boy in two days.

He has a dead mother, an alcoholic father, and a younger brother. You see him in every district child you have ever helped. That you have kept alive.

You want him to go home almost as much as you want to see Ron again.

You think of the sacrifice again, and feel sick. You had said no. You had told Dumbledore you wouldn’t accept that.

Why does your rejection feel so much like a binding contract?

If you go home, at his expense, building the path with his bones – well, what’s the difference? You couldn’t let a child be tortured for eternity for you, so you’ll kill one instead? Because eternal suffering cannot be contemplated, but Colin’s sacrifice will be forever too.

You said no. Because suffering is always silent and never right. Because your life is not worth more than anyone else’s. Because sacrifice should be willing. Because Dumbledore had asked if you would accept a sacrifice for everyone, but of course he meant if you would accept a sacrifice for yourself.

It does not really matter, as it turns out, because Colin Creevey dies age fourteen.

You decide, in the end, or near the very end anyway, that you will not go home. There are five tributes left, you and Colin are freezing to death, and you decide it, there and then, when you are collecting firewood. Not to burn because it will give your position away and you’re too weak to fight anymore, but just to stay warm. Colin is ill, sick, burning up with a fever. You cannot remember seeing anyone die before. You were shielded from that, living in the Victor’s Village.

You ran at the tolling of the bell, grabbing Colin as you raced into the nearby forest. The last time you saw him before the Arena you had both agreed against an alliance.

He stutters in the forest, begs you not to kill him, and you are so shocked you let go of him and he turns and flees through the woods. You call after him, and your voice is so raw and desperate he stops. He stands behind a tree and shouts shakily to you, asking why you grabbed him.

You are more confused than you have ever been in your life. Why does he think? “What do you mean? We couldn’t stay there! You know how many people die at the Cornucopia!”

He stays behind the tree. He is speaking levelly now. “I know. But we promised not to save each other.” 

Of course you promised that! It would be foolish to form an alliance, because you will always have to break it. But because you are friends, of course you will ally together. Of course you will run together, of course you will save each other.

It is then you realise he is not Ron. Ron would have understood what you were doing straight away. You forgot. He isn’t Ron. 

You are quiet as you say, “I didn’t mean you to – I wasn’t serious. Of course we’ll be allies. I was helping you.”

Colin steps out from behind the tree, comes closer, within touching distance. He says, softly, “Okay,” and that is that. Allies. Friends.

You were lucky to avoid the other Tributes for so long. With Colin’s elaborate knots and your fish from the stream, you fashion hammocks in the trees, a spit fire in the tree that is foolish when there is so much combustible wood around, it is exactly what Colin’s father told him not to do, beat into him, but you do not care. The gamekeepers will dampen any forest fire before it kills too many Tributes. Well, probably.

You decide it when chopping the wood, after many days of no food. The streams have dried up, even the trees are withering. They are too weak to hold your weight now, as light as you have become. You are slipping away fast, and Colin even faster.

You have been lucky so far, but your luck will not hold forever. They will find you, sure enough, at some point. They will kill you, if you do not kill them.

You have pushed the twisted child into the back of your mind. You have not been forced to contemplate sacrifice yet. You have not yet been forced to kill.

You cannot watch Colin die, and you cannot hasten it.

You will sacrifice yourself, sacrifice ever seeing your friends again. You feel calm. This is how it has to end, how it was always going to end. 

You feel so far away from your own time, away from Dumbledore, the conversation you had in that prison. You have almost forgotten you are not called James, that you are not from this time. 

You no longer care that Dumbledore implored you not to change anything. That if you die now, you will never have even been on this earth, however that works. That you will die twice, now and in the future by not being born. You don’t care, you don’t care. You have to sacrifice now, Colin is dying now. There are no more hypotheticals. Which is all the future is.

You’ll change the ending.

He dies anyway.

You know you need to wait until the right moment to leave him. You need to give him the greatest chance possible. You think up elaborate plans, even when you have no energy, but you settle for sticking close, ready to draw them away when the time comes.

It comes sooner than you expected, which should be good because your energy has not dwindled away to nothing. You rise when you hear the shouts. Colin is camouflaged by leaves. It is not much but it will be enough. You run, in the opposite direction, as fast as you can. You use up all of your energy, crashing through the overgrowth, noisy and obvious. The perfect prey. 

He taunts them. The idiot taunts them, his body so much weaker than his mind. He pays for it, they tear off his lips, force them down his throat before they kill him. They dump his body in a clearing, for the helicopter, but you get to it first. You bend over it, reverently, in a praying position, and your reprobation is not directed at God but at yourself. 

You cry and think. The more you see of death, the more you think one small sacrifice would be acceptable, if it avoided all of this. You wonder if that is what Dumbledore thinks. You just wish, more than ever, that you could offer yourself up as the sacrifice. 

Maybe Dumbledore does too.

Dumbledore won the first Hunger Games, you remember, that’s partly why he is so famous. He was a regional commander in the war, young enough to be put in the Games instead of executed after he was convicted of war crimes. There were less protests because it seemed to at least give the young commanders a chance. They were all meant to die, of course, a spy planted and primed to win. The spy was discovered and died a terrible death the seventh night of the Games.

There were atrocities committed during the war by Dumbledore’s side, but Dumbledore didn’t have anything to do with them, probably. He wrote, mostly, although he fought as well as anyone, tried to keep the fire of rebellion alive, stoking the flame and then extinguishing it when necessary, when the losses piled up and became too many to sustain, too many to accept for what would clearly be a losing battle. Some were in favour of fighting until the end, to the very last man and woman, but Dumbledore was not. He wrote the declaration of surrender and convinced his commanding officer to sign it and many never forgave him. They hunted him down in the Games.

It didn’t seem like Dumbledore was going to win, at first. Some of the commanders, including him, banded together, refused to fight, to play. But many did play.

The first few Games were unsettled, there were as many contestants as suited the Capitol, however many participants under eighteen and above twelve had been convicted in hastily arranged trials over the previous year, had been flushed out of their hiding places, turned in by their neighbours.

The number dwindled as the years passed, until it eventually declined to twenty-four and a decree was passed to formalise and codify the Reaping.

It was a simulated war, early on, a continuance of the struggle Dumbledore had ended. Some were happy to fight in it, to turn against their former comrades. There were factional alliances even during the war. 

Gryffindor had held the alliance together but he shot himself just before the end, to avoid falling into their hands, took his secrets and his unifying power to the grave. Some looked to Dumbledore after his death, already brilliant then, and were so betrayed when he capitulated. These seething forces below the surface were unleashed with full force during the Games. Former friends became enemies, their closeness used against them, the chink in their armour.

Hermione had told you all of this, and you had been fascinated, and horrified, listening closely.

Hermione was the one who found out about this forbidden history. The Capitol teaches you about Grindelwald, but never about his closest associate. At the time you assumed she read it in a book; you would never know because you never went to the library. You needed a teacher’s permission to read a book that was not on the slim permitted list, and most teachers were too fearful to give it.

Hermione was on the list to go into the same programme as Percy (you remember her crying to you the afternoon she found out, because Ron had said something mean) and was cleared to read any book in the Mayor’s locked library. But you realise now that story would never be in a book. She must have heard about it straight from Dumbledore. She had private tutoring with him, but she never said he spoke about politics or his past. You think that may be because you always sighed, played around with Ron, whenever Hermione talked about anything more serious than your dreams.

You want a chance to apologise, to speak to her about things that matter. You just want to see her.

Dumbledore was reformed. He had repented, after he had won the Games. He was spared. He had lived a long life serving the Capitol. You cannot even imagine him as a traitor.

The first Games, the war it became, turned from stalemate only after the Capitol’s nudging as former friends were driven to the same ravines and clifftops to kill each other. The last two were those two.

Gellert and Albus. So young and so brilliant. The most well-known regional commanders, the bright young future. Their names were entwined together so that it was always ‘Gellert and Albus’, never one or the other.

Albus was entranced, enamoured with Gellert. He ignored the killings of the informers, the purges within their ranks, the swift rise of Gellert’s thug friends and their curious organisation into a closely run group soon feared by those outside it, looked past the accidents their former friends kept suffering.

Albus abhorred violence, that’s why so many respected him. Gellert lived for it. He glorified it, satiated and gorged himself on blood. Violence for its own sake. Everything, he was fond of saying, _everything_ had ever been and would always be forged from blood. The Capitol say he would have created a world of capricious violence, random where the Capitol’s was regimented, a bloodthirsty and barbaric world, and they may have been right, Hermione confesses.

Dumbledore won the Games, so he must have killed Gellert, but Hermione was not sure of the details. That makes sense, now. That he did not tell her.

You hope Dumbledore is trying to find out how to send you back to your own time. And you wonder if you’ll ever be able to go home, even if you do win. You hope and hope. You try not to think about going home to your mother, who hates you. 

You are surprised you reach the final two, even though you have to, even though you know the future. You are still just Harry Potter. It is dumb luck you have got this far; you have progressed on instinct. You never knew how your father won after all.

Eventually it is you and another boy. District 1, you think. You do not even know. He is blond, sharp faced. His family are clearly rich because he looks well fed despite the deprivations of the Arena, and his ferocious weapon, the massive sword with rubies encrusted into the hilt, also attests to this. Somebody really wants him to come home. 

You make a heroic attempt to discharge him of his weapon and manage to send his sword flying into the fast flowing rapids. You are evenly matched, now. You fight and you realise you are slightly more sure footed, slightly faster. You have an advantage!

You knock him over and he lies on the floor, panting, scrabbling in the dirt. You hesitate. You are unsure of how to proceed, although it is obvious, too. This is not a boxing fight like the ones Dudley participates at in the town ring. There will be no winning without death, here. Your opponent cannot get up, or you have not won. You do not know what to do. You must kill him or let him kill you. You do not want to kill him, but you must. 

Because it’s all very well to sacrifice yourself, but what about those left behind?

Ron. Hermione. Dudley. Neville. Ginny. _Arthur_.

You think of them as you take the small stone, jagged, with one long edge, that you have had in your shirt pocket since the beginning, and drive it into his chest, just below the collarbone. Blood covers your hands, dancing merrily.

You have sacrificed a part of yourself, so that your father may win. You have sacrificed everything.

It’s not like what Dumbledore said. You are not killing him, letting him be the sacrifice, so that your father survives and wins, so that he marries your mother, so that you are born. It is not for the sanctity of the future that you act.

You would change the future in an instant if you truly believed it would be better. You would sacrifice yourself if you could save them all, just like that, but that is not how it works, you realise. It is not for you. It is for everyone else. It is for the people you love and those who love you.

Because if you’re not there, who will volunteer for Ron if he is ever chosen?

Because if you’re not there, who will take the book from Hermione when she is reading into the night, desperate to save the patient on her mother’s kitchen table who cannot be saved, and hold her while she cries?

Because if you’re not there, who will give Arthur the gold he needs to keep his children alive?

Because if you’re not there, whose money will stand between your aunt and cousin, and your uncle?

Because if you’re not there, who will keep all of those District children in clothes in the depth of winter and with clean water in the height of summer? 

Sacrifice can mean killing people, and you wish you never knew.

You win the Hunger Games. Your body finally gives up as you are lifted from the Arena and you slip into the easy blackness of nothingness. When you wake up, your body is perfect, healed, flawless. You feel rested and utterly at ease. You wonder idly if you have been given drugs. You look around, lazily, sweeping glances around your environment, although you’re not too sure why, because you are not that concerned about where you are. You’re not that concerned about anything.

There is a boy on the floor. He looks just like you. 

You close your eyes again. 

When you open them you feel jumpy and scared. You are no longer serene. You remember your state from earlier and it terrifies you. You leap up. Your mind has come back to you, but your body is still new. The boy is still there. 

Have they somehow taken your essence, your mind, and implanted it into a shiny new body? Have you shed your old, inferior skin like a snake? Is your offcut lying on the floor like discarded rubbish?

He is lying on his side. You prod him so he is lying flat and his eyes stare dully at you. A thrill goes through you although he does not move. His eyes are red.

You don’t know what to do, but you have to make a decision quickly because you hear voices coming from the dead end corridor your room is on. Your hearing, not deadened by the years of living by the high speed rail track, is sharp. It is a decision you make in a second. You lift up your father, put him on the bed, pull up the covers, and you hide. 

You did not even consider that they could already know there are two of you, shuddering in your hiding place as you realise that possibility, but thankfully nobody seems to think anything in the room is amiss. They poke and prod your father, seem satisfied by the results, and wait for him to wake up. He wakes up in degrees, and they are indulgent, let him.

You are still in the room when he is coherent enough to speak. He speaks low but clearly. He sounds nothing like you. You think about the interviews he gave after he won. He smiled but it did not reach his eyes. He looked wrecked, underneath it all. He looked like he does now. 

He came back different, everyone always said so.

You can hear what he is saying, over and over again. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”

They sedate him again.

You are cramped in the wardrobe you are hiding in, and you are thirsty. You need to speak to Dumbledore. Where are they taking you? 

You sneak off the hovercraft when it lands in the Capitol, amid all the noise and confusion. You are wearing Capitol clothing so nobody looks too closely at you. Everyone is focusing on your father. 

When you are walking around the Capitol that afternoon, trying to look inconspicuous, trying to hide in plain sight, people do stare. You think it is clear you are a time traveller at first, a lost traveller, until somebody in the queue at the supermarket looks at you hard before smiling and saying “I thought you were James!”

“Oh, no,” you manage to reply. “My name’s Harry.” It feels good to say it, after so long. You always forget how much you look like your father, until somebody reminds you. 

You need to find Dumbledore but you want to stay close to your father. You are the one lost in time but he looks even more lost than you some days. You follow him into an anonymous white building. You think it may be for the media, interviews, photoshoots, but it’s not. It is his therapist. The Capitol can’t fix everything wrong with him through surgery.

“I don’t remember what I did. They tell me, and they _show_ me, footage of me killing that boy, but I don’t remember any of it.”

The therapist is elderly, kind faced, smartly dressed. He is non-committal, staring piercingly but talking minimally until James slams his hand down on the desk and says “But why don’t I remember?” 

“Your brain is reacting to trauma. It’s protecting you. It’s normal. You might recover those memories but you might never be able to remember.” The tone is clinical but the eyes are kind. 

“I don’t feel like a Victor,” James whispers. The therapist is silent. You wonder what else he sees, what the other Victors confide in him. 

Outside, on the streets, in the magazines, the Capitol whispers to itself: he is not acting like a Victor. It angers you, that they dare talk about your father like that. You cannot say anything to the woman clearing your table at the café or the businessman you give directions to when they mention your father in passing, critically. What do they expect? What do they want? 

You are happy when James goes home. You sit two carriages away from him, fiddling with your sandwich wrapper. 

You are thinking that seeing James reuniting with his parents and Sirius will make up for a lot of what you have seen and done but when you get to the platform, the whole train waiting for him to disembark first, the platform full, he steps off and walks straight past them, eyes fixed ahead. The chatter halts. 

His father looks disappointed, but his mother says something quietly to him, putting a hand on his back, holding him in place. Giving James space.

Sirius runs after him. You do too.

You do not envy Sirius. You would have no idea what to say to your father. You catch up to Sirius just as he reaches James. It is easy to stay hidden behind them, they are walking towards the busiest pub in the District, and it is a big night after all. James is back.

You walk towards the pub confidently, and they do not pay you any attention. You are close enough to hear their conversation. Sirius is nonchalant. Forced, but he’s trying. He doesn’t discuss the Games or the scene at the station. He barely seems to acknowledge James has been gone. He makes jokes and talks about people they both know, pranks they both pulled, like they are just two teenagers out for a walk on an ordinary night.

He talks and talks, filling the gaps in the conversation easily. Your father does not say a word.

Sirius talks about Lily, a little cautiously, as if unsure how James will react, how much he should push. James’s expression does not change so he presses on. “And she missed you. She wants to see you.”

You think your father will snarl, say “I don’t need her pity!”, but he doesn’t. He is thoughtful. Pensive. Surprised at himself.

“To be honest, I haven’t thought about Lily. I – I can’t remember thinking about her… I don’t remember any of it. They say I might not ever get my memory back.”

He sounds like he cannot believe he ever forget about her.

“Look, all of that stuff is in the past. Forget it. Focus on Lily. I’ve got an idea.”

Your father laughs and says “You’ve always got an idea.”

He sounds like a careless teenager again. It reminds you so much of you and Ron. You wonder what Ron will say when you get home. If you get home, that is.

You want to see him, want to tell him all about it, more than anything. See his face in wonder and incredulity, make him speechless, laugh at him as he eventually says “Wow. Bloody hell.”

Arthur will tell you it’s not your fault, Ginny will tell you bluntly you were an idiot not to go straight to Dumbledore now, Hermione will probably be able to tell you all about time travel. Ron will read between the lines of everything you say: I wish you were there. I was so scared. I thought I was never coming home.

Sirius is quiet only once. “I didn’t watch it, you know.”

He may be the only one. 

You watch as your parents meet again, accompanied by Sirius who is grinning widely. They are careful with each other, cautious. Like strangers, although they must have known each other for years. Lily is courteous, James is polite. It is painfully awkward to watch.

You follow your mother instead of your father home, and she cries.

You go back to find James and Sirius.

James is slumped, Sirius sympathetic. It should make you feel sad, like your mother crying did, but it is so normal. James had an awkward conversation with a girl. He’s alive to do that, because of you.

“Come on, it wasn’t _that_ bad.” Sirius is saying but he shuts up as James lifts his head to glare at him.

You see the exact moment it turns from being a normal teenage situation to something else. James says “You can ask her out, you know. I –” and he stops like he does not know how to finish. 

Sirius looks at him like he’s an idiot. “Are you kidding? She only had eyes for you.”

Your father has been living in the Victor’s Village. You have been too. You have taken up residence in an empty house next to your father’s. It is weird, peering in his windows, watching him when he is alone, but you forgive yourself because you have been an orphan for fourteen years and this is your only chance. And it is painful enough without castigating yourself. 

The house your father moved into is your childhood home. It is bizarre, watching him sit in Dudley’s place on the sofa, weird to see no pictures on the mantelpiece where dressy shots of Dudley sit, weird to see your room filled with its original period furniture, gathering dust.

You find Dumbledore eventually. Or he finds you. You’re not sure. He does not look unhappy or surprised to see you.

“You’re still here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I had hoped you would go home when you won. You did very well, Harry.”

You think you make a face. You did a lot of things but you did not do well.

“You only killed when you had to. You only took what you had to.”

“Yes, sir.”

You do not want to discuss this.

“Nonetheless… you are still here. I suspect it is only temporary. That you will go home soon.”

You feel heartened. “I hope so.”

“I wonder why you are still here. I wonder…”

You wonder, too.

Dumbledore’s face clears and he reaches into his desk drawer. “I have something for you.”

You do want any souvenir from the arena, any medal for doing well, any money. You are a common thief now, scrounging from bins and eating blackened bread and nettle soup. You deserve it. Dumbledore pulls out a flowing cloak. You can hardly see what colour. It is almost autumn, but not cold. You hope you will not be here in winter, and you hope you will.

He must see your puzzlement, because he explains what the cloak is. “It is an Invisibility Cloak. It was your grandfather’s – no, your great-grandfather’s. I was waiting for the right time to give it to your father, but I can see you need it more.”

Once, you would have leant forward in your chair, reached out to touch it. Once, you would have asked a million questions. Once, you would have challenged him, said an invisibility cloak was impossible. But you know nothing is impossible now.

All curiosity was deadened out of you in the Arena. “Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t lose yourself in it, Harry. Remember, this is the past. Do not lose yourself here.”

“Yes, sir.”

The cloak allows you to get much closer to your parents, to spy from the same room. You live in your father’s house, your home. You sleep in your room. James does not notice anything. You try to help him, because is he is alone. You do household chores, you do the washing up, you dust, you turn off the TV and lay a blanket on your father when he falls asleep in the early morning on the sofa.

Lily notices once, the clock has been wound when it was not the day before, and James says “I don’t remember,” with a crack in his voice and you resolve to stop. You’re not helping. 

In the dead of night you hear talking. Your father sounds upset. You go to him and find him sitting with Lily, alone, lit by the flickering firelight. Your father is upset, your mother soothing. You’ve never seen them alone together; Sirius has always been there. You hold your breath. It feels like a turning point.

“Lily, it’s not right. I don’t remember.” 

“It’s all right. It’s okay. It’s just your brain protecting you.”

“I’m sick of everyone saying that.” 

Lily is silent.

You wait for a while but they do not speak again. You stand up, assuming they have both gone to bed. You freeze, seeing them still on the sofa. You are wearing the cloak but their eyes are closed anyway. Lily has her arm around James, holding him close.

Your mother and father begin to spend more time together. You can’t believe you thought their marriage was ever one of money. They are patently so good for each other.

And then, everything comes crashing down.

James has been living in the Victor’s Village, studiously ignoring everyone but Sirius and Lily. They let this situation go on for a while but eventually begin to broach the topic of James seeing other people.

Sirius mentions his parents, but the look James fixes him with makes him drop it, chastened. You understand, you think. Sirius has just got James back. He doesn’t want to lose him again. 

Lily is braver. “They’re your parents, James. They don’t care! They love you. Please. Nothing you could do –”

“If my son had done that –” James begins in an angry voice but you do not hear the rest because you’re already running away. 

His son did do that, and you can never tell him how sorry you are.

You go to Dumbledore. There is no-one else. No Arthur here, who through no fault of you or your father, is more like a father to you than James ever was.

You do not explain what happened, although he probably guesses. You just want to go home, at that moment. Your real home. You are angry at Dumbledore because he is the only one you can be angry at without breaking the secrecy of time and space. He tries to placate you. 

“It’s a gift, Harry. You deserve one.”

This makes you angrier.

“A gift, watching my parents die?”

“You have already seen it, Harry. You think you do not remember but it is within you.” 

He is right, but you wrench away anyway, and run where you know he will not come after you. You go back to your home, but it is not your home yet.

You do not want to think about it but you cannot help it, sometimes.

How exactly did you become an orphan?

You want to prepare yourself for what is as sure as time to come, but you know you will never be prepared for it. Your parents are so painfully alive. Your mother twirls, her long skirt flying in the air, cheeks flushed as your father stands there laughing, and it is so cruel that you have come back to view this moment only to know they will die soon. 

You can feel a pull back to your own time, but you cannot leave yet. You do not know whether it is because you need to see their deaths, or because you just want to spend as much time with them as you can. It is not enough because they are not your parents here, but it’s something.

A few weeks later, you see your grandparents come out of your father’s house. They are smiling. They have forgiven James for what they think he has done, and it makes it easier to forgive yourself. James is sixteen. He is still a child, not a father. If he knew you, knew what you had done, he would forgive you. You believe this.

You lose time.

You skip forward days, months, _years_. You see flashes of domesticity, of grins, of long walks in the sun, of three boys and your father, of quiet moments late at night in the kitchen, painful conversations, tears. The dawn breaking.

You are fixated on your parents throughout. You sit in quiet contemplation, watching. It is bad for you, you know. You know you are getting lost in the past, as Dumbledore told you not to. But it’s not just the past, it’s _your_ past.

Ten days after your father turns eighteen, the notice comes. It is on fancy stiff white card, the embossed letters curling, curved in silver, reading ‘The Capitol requests the presence of JAMES POTTER’ and a date and time. Your father is confused.

He talks to some of the other victors now, forming tentative friendships. Companionship, at least. He knows there is no Games business, no high society parties where his presence would be required. The next time he needs to be in the Capitol is in two months’ time. He goes to speak to another victor, an affable middle aged man. You go too, because you find the other victors interesting and you never knew this particular one as he moved to the Capitol when you were small.

He is very, very kind when he tells your father.

You run away, into the woods. You sit at the base of a tree all night, watch the sky darken, the animals come out.

You do not want to go back to your father. You are scared of what you will find. You are a coward.

He refuses to go. Him and Lily are pale for a few days, but soon, after nothing happens, they return to normal. You remain on edge; you know the Capitol better. Although you do not understand fully until the very end, because it does not make sense for the Capitol to kill your parents now. You have not been born yet. But something is coming, you know it.

It is two months later, when you are in the Capitol with your father and Lily, that it happens. You have relaxed a little, you are enjoying not having to be under the cloak all of the time. You pose as a Capitol citizen, enjoying the crowds and excitement of the Victors’ Visit, just another fan.

James is told on live television. They say it is a mistake. Nothing is ever a mistake.

You are watching the interview with him and Lily as they giggle together. They are in love, it is plain to see. James is scheduled to publicly propose the next night, although you know they are already secretly engaged. 

If you had known he was going to that night, you would not have been there, but you must have missed your father preparing. You give them their privacy, stare at the moon instead. You creep away when you can. Your parents should have been there to tell you about it as you grew up, the sky turning purple above them, the feast, the easy conversation, staring across the ocean and imagining a life away, or a life lived here, but always lived together. The magic of the moonlight spilling across their bodies. You realised then, and left, and will never hear the rest.

After the introductions and pleasantries, the interviewer leans forward, her face taking on a sympathetic look. Her lip gloss is so pink, it’s all you can focus on. 

“It must have been very hard to come today,” the interviewer says.

“Sorry?” James says politely.

“Well, I know that your parents died last night. It was a tragic boating accident, right?” the pink lips say.

The interviewer waits for an answer it is clear will never come. James is frozen. Lily stammers, “Boating… they didn’t own a boat.”

The audience knows something is wrong and whisper amongst themselves. The producers cut to already filmed footage.

The interviewer leans back in her chair, satisfied. Job done.

You know your father will not believe it until he sees the bodies, because is that not why you are staying in the past. Him and Lily go straight back on the fastest bullet train. You do too. You want to grieve for them, the grandparents you never got to know. You slip the cloak on again and follow them to the morgue. Your grandparents’ bodies are perfect. There is barely a scratch on them. Good for identification purposes, and as a warning. They will have made sure of that. 

They leave your father alone afterwards. No notices. You know it is not forever, but your parents do not. They really think they have sacrificed enough, but you know no sacrifice is ever enough.

You watch your mother find out she is expecting you, all alone in the bedroom. She gasps, her eyes light up. She cries, and looks down at her stomach in wonder, and dances around the room. Your father cries too when she tells him. You watch as the days lengthen, as they paint your bedroom green, as your mother swells. Time is starting to distort now, and you know it is almost time to go. But you want to see yourself in their arms, happy with them for the only time. Then you will leave.

They do not think, they do not realise. How your birth gives the Capitol something else to hold over your father. They cannot fathom that depth of evil, because neither of them has been in the Arena.

You are two days old when the notice comes. The Chancellor has left him alone for long enough, although no-one could ever be old enough for that. You knew you should have left as soon as you were born, as soon as you had satisfied your desire to see yourself with your parents for the first time. You were planning to leave soon. You thought you would have a little more time before the end.

Your father goes white but you recognise his expression: he is about to do something he knows he should not. You really do look just like him. Your mother just looks shocked. She argues with him. It is hard watching your mother lay alone in bed, crying, and harder to see your father sitting blankly on the sofa downstairs. Your mother does not understand but you do. Your father is keeping you and your mother safe. You would do anything for your family too.

He goes, and he comes back. You are surprised and incredibly uneasy. You thought that was it. That your father had a change of heart, turned around, came back home, that the Capitol killed him and your mother for it… 

There is a perfect moment, near the end. They don’t know it, but you do. Because you have seen pictures of yourself older than right now, but never with your parents. 

You watch from beneath the cloak, nose pressed up to the living room window as your father plays with you. He throws you into the air and catches you every time. You laugh delightedly. Your mother frowns at first, tells your father to be careful. She loves you so much, she couldn’t bear it if anything happens to you. Your father tells her to relax and she does.

You see the love in her eyes as she laughs at your father, his arms outstretched to catch you as you tumble back to earth. You want to commit it to memory, burn it into your brain, never forget how it feels to be so loved. You think you never did. You remember this. It is your first memory. You always thought it was Molly and Arthur, before Molly died, but you see now it is not.

In the end, you do not see your parent’s death. You never find out how it happened, although you have no doubt the Capitol was to blame. You feel some small perverse relief that your parents are no longer at the mercy of the Capitol.

You never find out how you survive, although you suspect Dumbledore played a role. His question was too pointed. You now realise his question on sacrifice says more about himself than it does about you, that it was him questioning himself, not you.

You have sacrificed enough.

You go forward in time, and you cannot wait to see the look on Ron’s face when he sees you again.

Although you will never get to.

You go forward in time, although too late to hear Percy read Ron’s name in the Reaping.

Too late to watch Ron tell your father not to volunteer for him, as your father looks bewildered and acquiesces.

You appear too late to notice that Percy does not look smug or proud. He is pale beneath his freckles.

You appear too late to say your last goodbye to Ron.

You appear too late to stop Ginny from slapping you, because you’re not yourself and Ron is gone, Ron is _gone_.

You appear too late to watch Ron profess his love for Hermione in the interview, as she sobs into your father’s shoulder and nods at Ginny’s unasked question.

You appear too late to join in the furtive conversations between Percy and Arthur, and too late to prevent the secret police from finding the evidence after searching the house, and too late to attend Percy’s hanging. 

You appear too late to watch Ron be stabbed at the Cornucopia. 

Too late to watch his slow decline.

Too late to witness his death, two weeks in the Games, from thirst, merciful, all things considered.

You appear in time to stand at the station, to watch his body be returned to you, to receive it. Holding Arthur up, holding Ginny’s hand tight. You bear Ron, walk in step with Fred, George, Bill and Charlie. You stand bereft as, a mile from the house, Ginny breaks from the front of the small procession and insists on bearing the coffin on her shoulders only. 

You are in time for his funeral.

And your sacrifice, all sacrifice, is for nothing.


	4. IV

  **All Those Shadows**

 

* * *

 

 

_Dreaming dreams with happy endings_

 

At some point, some interminable moment that was indistinguishable from the previous and to the next, when it was as quiet and as peaceful as it ever got in the arena, when so much time had gone by since the gong had sounded that Harry didn’t know whether it had been ten days or twenty and had long since stopped caring - at that moment Hermione wrote something on the wall. With a carefully pointed finger, tongue sticking out in concentration as she dabbed crushed berries onto the sun-orange rock.

Or – she didn’t write on the wall, not exactly. Not in any writing system Harry could decipher, anyway. But the lines she painted certainly didn’t seem to represent things literally to him so they weren’t pictures, either. They were symbols, wedge shapes, sharply angled lines. They looked somewhat like little arrows to Harry, sometimes paired together, sometimes entwined in other shapes. Hermione painted them quickly with deft hands, like she had practice in doing so.

All of it was utterly, utterly incomprehensible to Harry.

“What are you writing?” he asked curiously.

He could tell instinctively that she was writing with a logic and a purpose, an order underpinning the arrow script. She wasn’t just randomly putting shapes together.

Harry hadn’t exactly been a great student but he also hadn’t exactly been given much of a chance to prove himself. His uncle Vernon had withdrawn him from school when Dudley had left, even though his end of year exam results meant he was one of the few students who could have stayed. Harry remembered one of his teachers coming to the house and encouraging Harry to continue with his education with a view to taking up one of the Capitol’s scholarships when he got old enough.

The beating he got after his teacher left had left him unable to sit down for two days. Vernon Dursley did not value education and did not like being told what to do by a woman. No-one as unimportant as Harry would be going to the Capitol. Not if Vernon had anything to do with it. 

Vernon paid for every scrap of food that Harry ate and Harry’s father was one of Vernon’s employees. Vernon had the ability to make life very difficult for him and he would do so, Harry knew.

Harry’s parents had been so sad when he told them he wouldn’t be returning to school. Sad they couldn’t do more for him.

But Harry understood.

Vernon was a successful man back home in Harry’s district. Harry thinks Vernon could have gone to the Capitol on a scholarship when he was young but instead he had left school to join his father’s business when he was thirteen. He imported goods from the Capitol. He was adept at knowing who to bribe and who to report equally corrupt businessmen to. He knew who to charm and flatter, who was getting the next diplomatic position in a more important District or in the Capitol, who was being promoted and who was being investigated. 

He thrived even when the sanctions were applied. He made his first million while skeletal children died on the streets of Seven. Harry was grateful, truly, that his uncle never threw him out onto the street to live and die like them.

Harry’s parents couldn’t protect him from Vernon, even though they tried. They had been young when they conceived him. They hadn’t meant to although they never regretted it. They got drunk and unlucky and just wanted to forget the terror and horror of their life for a moment and – well.

Nine months later, Lily grunted and sweated on the outside toilet of her sister’s new mansion and Vernon told them he would take in the brat, he supposed.

They knew that if they wanted Harry to eat and survive to age five they had to agree, so they did. In return, James laboured 15 hours a day in Vernon’s factory and never took home so much as a fraction of what he earned. Lily scrubbed and cleaned on her knees in Vernon and Petunia’s large airy home. Harry cooked all of the meals and never ate much – and wasn’t allowed the fancy Capitol imported chocolate and cakes – and he thought him and his parents must have paid back his keep until age eighteen many times over by now but Vernon wasn’t a man who listened to children or anyone he saw as beneath him which was most people.

Lily and James lived in a small house without central heating or running water a thirty-minute walk from the Dursley’s neighbourhood. Harry wasn’t supposed to go there but Vernon was away a lot on business and he never cared too much about Harry’s whereabouts even when he was at home.

Harry had to bribe Dudley by doing his homework to avoid him tattling to Vernon, because while Vernon didn’t care if it wasn’t brought to his attention, he would undoubtedly make a fuss if Dudley brought it up.

Petunia never seemed to notice when he went to go visit his parents, although he knew she must. He grew bolder as he got older. He would take them two small slices of the chocolate and raspberry cake Petunia had ordered, or he’d purposefully spill wine on blankets so they would be thrown out and he could retrieve them from the bin and take them to his parents.

The Dursleys had one of the largest pantries in the district but despite that Dudley couldn’t cook. Petunia could; she grew up as poor as Lily still was, but she didn’t often. That was what Lily and Harry were there for, Lily’s wage the food Harry ate for free every night. She had to slip down odds and ends when cooking because even if there were lots of leftovers they were never offered to Lily, and instead went straight into the bin. The waste horrified Harry. Often, Dudley refused to even try whatever food Lily had made. But if Lily made burgers as Dudley forced her to, Petunia worried vainly about her figure. Most nights Lily had to cook two separate meals in addition to a salad and sides. Vernon shovelled whatever what was put in front of him into his mouth almost mechanically, and Harry thought Lily found that even more degrading and belittling than Petunia and Dudley’s whining.

Lily taught him to cook from when he was young. Harry remembers being a toddler, and feeling safe and loved in the Dursley kitchen, warm and bright like the rest of the house wasn’t, filled with love and laughter, mixing a cake with his mother and licking the bowl. 

When he was younger Harry was always confused about where his mother went after they had eaten and why she had to go. But he never cried. Lily would bop him on the nose and tell him to be a brave little boy for her and he wanted to so desperately.

Lily went home and cried in James’s arms because they had to leave their friendly little boy in such a sad and lonely house with people who didn’t love him and didn’t care for him. He was so polite, never crying or whining, but he was still so young. Every day Lily had to leave him in the lion enclosure. Who knew what a decade in that house would do to him? It was their worst fear that Harry would grow up to detest them and be embarrassed by them. They hoped and prayed he would never treat them like servants and order them around like Dudley did.

If he lived with them there would be bedtimes with old picture books read in funny voices. They would talk to him about his day and play with him and encourage his natural curiosity in exploring the world. Teach him to be kind and gentle and strong. Tell him they loved him every day. Lily would show him how to paint and how to retrieve eggs without scaring the hens, and James would swing him on his shoulders on walks through sun-dappled forest and point out the bird calls. They would patiently guide him through trials and mistakes he made with understanding and Harry would curl up in their bed at night, knowing he was loved and protected always. It was all he wanted.

But if he lived with them there would also be gnawing hunger pains and the uncertainty and instability of life on the margins. 

All you need is love. Not quite.

His parents never had a choice to have him but they never, ever, begrudged him their love.

Harry was grateful because if Vernon hadn’t have taken him in, sure, he would have been with his parents, but he also might have died in the terrible famine that crept into the district the winter he was five.

His parents blanched and pulled him quickly by the arm past the half-covered bodies of children in their dying throes, frozen. 

Lily had dropped a pan of spaghetti one night that winter, too tired and cold and thin to the very bone to be coordinated. She stumbled and fell into the shards and sauce on the floor. Vernon was furious, screaming and purple faced. Petunia, pale and thin-lipped, made Harry clean up the mess on the floor while Dudley was told to go to his room. Unhappy at missing what promised to be a good telling off and humiliation, he stomped upstairs loudly.

Vernon threw Lily out for good, exiling her to the house she lived in with James across the moors, no heat, wind whistling through the gaps in the roughly nailed wooden planks. She’d freeze to death out there. They both would. Vernon told her if she came back he’d put Harry out on the street too. 

It was two weeks before Lily and James were on their doorstep, James deathly pale and barely conscious. Lily dropped to her knees and begged. 

Vernon enjoyed the show but was about to close the door on them when Lily’s entreaties had trailed off into silent sobbing. Petunia quietly stayed his hand and let her sister and her husband into the house. Harry didn’t understand why she didn’t put her foot down more often. Whenever she did, which wasn’t often – and she hadn’t done it when he was forced to leave school at age ten – Harry had never seen Vernon refuse her. For all his faults, he seemed to give her everything she wanted. Dresses, jewellery, all the pearls and diamonds she wanted.

She was a cruel, vapid woman. A twit. More interested in fashion than anything that lay beyond her perfectly spruced garden walls. Harry had heard that Lily had always been their parents’s favourite, and he supposed Petunia was now getting her payback.

For the rest of that terrible winter, Lily and James stayed in the small room next to the washing room in the Dursley home, kept alive by Petunia’s mercy, while the bodies piled up outside the cemetery walls, the ground too frozen to dig into. The first day the snow melted, they left.

Harry always thought one day Vernon would throw him out too, but it hadn’t happened yet. And then he was reaped and he thinks maybe dying at five wouldn’t have been so bad so long as those five years were filled with love.

 

~

                                                                                                                       

When Hermione was writing on the wall in the arena, she and Harry were alone. Ron had left and they had decided right back at the beginning that they wouldn’t ally with anyone else.

Harry was ostensibly on watch but he was so bored he thought he would almost welcome an intruder trying to kill them.

Their lives revolved around food and water and shelter. Shadows among the trees and traps on the ground. There were no books in the arena, no pens, certainly no crossword puzzles like the ones Harry used to do with his parents every Sunday when he went to visit, each doing three before passing it on to the next person. There were no footballs for Ron and Harry to kick around – well, before Ron had left, that is.

There was no time or energy to waste crushing their precious berries in the dirt and then painting them on the dusty wall as Hermione had decided to do. Harry didn’t even know what he would write even if he were to write in English or Latin and not the weird alphabet Hermione was using. He felt deadened by exhaustion and the arena. Every second of his life was now televised. What was left for him to write about?

He had nothing in him to write, to tell, to pass on. But clearly Hermione did. Harry was exhausted and thirsty and hot but despite all of that he felt curiosity well up in him nonetheless.

Hermione explained what she was doing with a soft smile on her face, open and passionate despite everything. She was as willing as ever to take the time to explain something, notwithstanding the hunger and the pain and the loss. She was so earnest in that moment that Harry felt a fierce surge of fondness join the curiosity in his chest, burning deep in him. He wanted Hermione to survive almost as much as he wanted to go home to his parents.

Or was it that he wanted to go home to his parents almost as much as he wanted Hermione to survive? He couldn’t tell.                                                 

“Where I live there are ancient ruins,” Hermione said. “Properly ancient. Not just from, you know, before the Dark Days, but from thousands and thousands of years ago. Or even longer. We don’t really know. And some of those ruins have writing on. At least we _think_ it’s writing.” 

She continued to print the funny looking pictures as she explained. Harry lay relaxed on the ground, looking at her. His arms and his legs ached to the bone. His hand was loosely grasping his sword, ruby encrusted and diamond edged, but his eyes were fixated on Hermione’s hands as they brushed the wall, looping up and down, hypnotising him with their grace.

He had never before considered any of this, what people were like in the very distant past, early people and their writing systems, how different they were and how similar too. He was from District Eight. They just didn’t think about things like that there. There was no time even if there had been the will and inclination.

It wasn’t part of their worldview. For all they cared, it wouldn’t have affected their life if humans had suddenly sprouted from the earth a few hundred years before with the rise of Panem.

He supposed, when he forced himself to think about it, head beating from the sun above, it was a sign of a sick society. Which meant that Hermione’s district was slightly healthier than his if people could even begin to consider their own past and what had come before.

Thinking about the past made him a little dizzy although that could also have been the lack of food and sufficient sleep. But once he had started thinking about it, he couldn’t stop, couldn’t ever imagine being ignorant and unaware of what past human societies had been like.

Thinking about them made it so much easier to imagine that it didn’t have to be the way it was in Panem forever. There had been societies in the past totally different to them. Maybe better, maybe worse. And so – the inevitable conclusion - there would be different ones in the future, too. It was a radical idea to Harry and it would have been a radical one to almost everyone in his District.

And all of it, contained in those esoteric lines and unknown semiotics.  

“Anyway,” Hermione continued, “- almost every Sunday me and my dad used to go to the caves where the ruins were. He would teach me from books he wasn’t supposed to have. I told you my grandfather was a professor, didn’t I? He was imprisoned by Fudge before the Dark Days. Dad said when he was imprisoned he was more concerned about what would happen to his books than anything else. Dad always said I was just like him.”

She looked down, lost in her memories. 

“I’m sure you are.”

Harry didn’t know what else to say. He had never known his grandparents and so their loss was only abstract to him. They had died young, like everyone in his District did.

One way Harry tried to cope with the ravages of the arena was by reminding himself that, arena or no arena, there was no guarantee he’d make it through his childhood. He reminded himself he might have died at twelve anyway and he would never have known Hermione in that alternate ending.

Hermione put the final flourishes to her bright-red inscription on the sandstone cliff, pressing down hard with her finger, before stepping away triumphantly. She looked happy, bright-eyed and young, like she had forgotten where she was and what her fate would soon be.

Like she had forgotten that Ron was gone.

That the father she talked so lovingly of would be forced to watch her violent death on camera and bury whatever of her came back. 

That she would probably never open another book in her life, and if she did Harry would have had to die for her to live. 

Harry wanted to forget too. He didn’t want the moment of serenity to end. He wanted to pretend to be a child, like he was much younger than twelve, like he could be reckless and brave and do whatever he wanted and it wouldn’t matter because he would be protected by adults, his parents and teachers and neighbours and his society.

When he was really young, despite the small bodies on the streets, he felt like he would live forever and if he didn’t that was okay because twelve was so old. Now he was twelve and he was about to die and he understood that it wasn’t old at all.

It was foolish and a false illusion but he felt safe, sitting there listening to Hermione. It was ridiculous because they were never really safe in the arena and both Harry and Hermione had tried to impress this upon Ron many times, when he wanted to light a fire or go to the stream to satisfy their burning thirst or even launch a desperate and suicidal attack on the Careers.

“We’re dying anyway, so what’s the point of dying a slow death with no food or water!” Ron had said and Harry wavered sometimes but Hermione never budged.

That kind of need for reckless burning action had disappeared with Ron and they lived in a suspended state of surreptitious danger.

Harry didn’t know how much more of it he could take. When it was his turn to sleep he could barely close his eyes without random spotty moments from his childhood coming to him, as animated as if they had happened yesterday, relentless and draining, as he remembered being happy and safe with his parents, and then remembered how he could never be any of that again.

He could only get away with so many nights telling Hermione that he wasn’t tired and would take watch. He was jumpy and his sleep deprivation was becoming dangerous to both of them. He feared stabbing Hermione with his sword accidentally and rationally knew that was entirely possible in his current state. 

Harry stood up, ignoring the burning feeling in his knees and the dull pain that never seemed to leave his muscles now and walked closer to the wall. It was easy to leave the arena behind when inspecting Hermione’s painting. 

He could so effortlessly imagine a younger Hermione on her father’s knee, bouncing up and down with eagerness and uncontained curiosity to discover everything she could about the world.

His hand loosened on the sword and he closed his eyes, leaning his head back to let the sun’s rays hit him, as Hermione’s runes burned on the back of his eyelids.

 

**ú-šá-áš-qu-ú a-mat kab-tu šá lit-mu-da šá-ga-š[á]**

**ú-šap-pal dun!-na-ma-a šá la i-šu-[ú] hi-bi[l-ta]**

**ú-ka-an-nu rag-ga šá an-zil-la-šú**

**ú-ta-ra-du ki-i-nu šá tè-em ili pu-u[q-qu]**

**ú-[ma]-lu-ú pa-šal-lu sá hab-bi-lu ni-[sir-ta]**

**ú-raq-qa iš-pik-ku šá pi-iz-nu-qu ti-‘-ut-[su]**

**ú-da-na-an śal-tu šá-pu-hur-šú an-n[u]**

**ú-la-la ib-ba-tu i-dar-ri-is-su la le-e-[a]**

**ú ia-a-ši it-nu-šu bēl pa-ni ri-dan-n[u]**

 

“What does it mean?” Harry asked after a while. The sun burnt lower, scarlet and ember, apocalyptic red.

“I don’t actually know,” Hermione said slowly. “Grandad’s books didn’t really have anything similar, we could never decipher it. It was just a fun puzzle on Sundays with my dad. I don’t think he ever intended us to actually figure it out but of course I always thought... when I was older.”

Hermione paused and smiled ruefully. They both knew there was no ‘when she is older’ any more.

“And now, I just like the idea of somebody in the future reading them. Leaving a message. One that will last longer than we will.”

She laughed but it was high and breathy.                                                                                                                

Harry stared at the ancient runes, wondering what, exactly, the odd looking scratches on the wall meant. If anyone would ever know, or if it was lost forever. If the people who wrote the words could have comprehended a time when their language was not comprehensible; if they thought their society would never end, either. And whether they would have mourned its passing, if they had known.

If anyone will mourn _them_ , and paint their words on walls long after their death. Even when they don’t know what the words mean.

Even when it’s all gone.

 

 

_You and I’ll be safe and sound_

 

Harry Evans was reaped on a Sunday. 

Before King Odai came to power a Sunday reaping would have been unthinkable. Sunday, the day of rest. The day of the lord. The day off.

Reapings, by contrast, were hard work, tough effort and painful sacrifice and it was because of this that they had always been on Saturday, replacing a day of work in the fields.

Sunday was their day, and their little bit of freedom.

The people needed a little bit of freedom. That was how empires survived.

Reapings should not be done on God’s day. It was an unwritten law that was suddenly broken. It was an outrage; sacrilegious. Old Father Peter, who had been kicked out of the Capitol’s seminary when he was young for asking why the poor had no food, said it went against God himself.

Although, as the butcher muttered to himself - knowing how futile it was to argue directly with Peter - when God wanted children sacrificed to appease the Capitol, the actual date of the reaping was almost inconsequential.

Far away in the Capitol, the cathedral still held the blood stains of the innocent. They would never be washed away, left to rust and brown on the smooth marble floor, much as the sins of the Districts could never be cleansed no matter how much District children’s blood was spilled.

The written holy word had been lost – _destroyed_ \- centuries back but some stories remained in folklore, told by firelight and candlelight and daylight.

One man killed his child to appease God and God rewarded him richly; another killed his brother and saw heaven on earth. A man was righteously strung up on the cross for claiming to be the son of God and the spilt blood of the heretic soaked into the earth, nourishing it; during the next harvest grain bloomed where before it had failed, proving life itself blossomed from sacrifice.

The Capitol kindly commissioned huge tapestries of these holy stories and unveiled them in the District’s churches, lecturing the congregants on their meaning until even the youngest subject could mumble it back obediently, eyes held up reverently. 

While some like Peter complained about the Reaping’s change of day and most agreed with him in his most distilled essentials, many like the butcher acquiesced easily. People in the Districts had not distinguished between God and the Capitol in a very long time. Most of the holy men sent out to the Districts from the central seminary did not follow Peter in his doomed youthful rebellion: they were knowledgeable, passionate and devout, but also inexperienced, naïve or arrogant, and often both, sent to the barbaric Districts as eager young recruits to stamp out the lingering flames of heathenism. After five years of service they were allowed back into the inviolable sanctity of the Holy Capitol to minister to the truly faithful.

The priests’ fervour and faith in their mission could be contrasted with the brutal and indifferent Peacekeepers who were wholly trained in the art of repression by the time they left their training camp. Regardless, both of them worked to subdue the Districts. 

In a way, the priests were even crueller. They set their flock off on a journey they knew they could never hope to reach the destination of; they taught them how to express themselves with writing and then forbade them from doing so. They sent them down the mines to use their hands in such a brutal and blunt manner that they ended up as claws. Parents entrusted their children to them and they knew that despite the parent’s hopes the children would never be allowed to accomplish more than their parents had. 

They taught them they could think but didn’t teach them how. They instructed them with knowledge and facts but beat them when they expressed a question, any independent thought or critical, rigorous logic. It was a perversion of education.

While the priests dutifully endured deprivations their fellow capitol citizens would not begin to tolerate, their pedagogical tools, particularly of repetition, were alien to many existing traditions in the Districts where lively philosophical discussion had flourished even before the anarchic and almost messianic days of the rebellion.

The mass literacy programme of the church had resulted in great success for the Capitol’s mission to establish its rigidly hierarchical and doctrinal spiritual rule. It had all been so different before the Dark Days. There were no schools. No District children were educated. There were churches in the Districts but the priests didn’t see children as the future for their eternal rule. Many District citizens went to church every Sunday and at home practiced the old religion, subversive in its very existence.

The policy was only introduced and bore fruit as the first generation after the Dark Days were born and the light let in to their lives. Harry’s grandparents grew up attending mandatory mass; schools were built in the shadows of churches and put under their control, the literature classes of the Capitol’s school system were replaced altogether by Bible Listening; as the ruined rubbles of libraries were replaced by rows of shacks to accommodate the growing wretched masses and books burnt for no other reason than to keep the burners and their children warm.

Parents in the districts wanted their children to learn how to read and they did not care much that they had to give up their children to the church to do so.

And wasn’t sacrifice good?

Wasn’t that what they were told, every Sunday? Didn’t they have technology in the Capitol, and all kinds of books, and machines, and didn’t they know the truth of everything, and weren’t they benevolent to pass even a fraction of it to the broken and shamed Districts as they did?

Those sacrificed children came to truly believe everything the holy men told them and in turn passed it onto their own children. They were taught that the Emperor was God’s representative on earth, and God the Emperor in the sky.

The end result was that to many a sub-educated eye in the District the Capitol _was_ God, divinely inspired. God, Emperor, Ruler and King were all tangled together, so tight that to question one was to pull the whole glorious edifice apart.

Some in the Capitol, in the heady days after the total Victory when open discussion and dissent was briefly possible and new ways of ruling so seemingly within reach, had disapproved of the plans to educate the children of the disloyal districts; they wanted to keep them an ignorant and pacified population forever more.

If they couldn’t read they couldn’t think, and if they couldn’t think they wouldn’t rebel. 

But foresight and cooler heads were to prevail: the men who were deciding the contours of the new world - who hadn’t done much of the fighting themselves, had sat stiffly behind the lines strategising as their men fell - knew nothing was more likely to reignite the dying embers of rebellion than such a harsh and retributive measure.

What had they fought for, if not to be able to _use_ the districts and their workers and their women and their children as their playground, their slaves, their labour? What good to anyone was a world where District children could not be used? 

What would their myths and history be replaced with, after such a crushing defeat, if the districts were not taught their distinct identities, where conservative authority was traditionally emphasised? 

No-one knew. And that scared the capitol.

But they did have to placate the men who had fought on the frontlines and won the war for them. And so it was decided that most of the children of what became the re-organised and re-divided Districts would indeed be educated but in order to remind their parents of the foolishness of rebellion, of the sanctity of innocence and how easily it could be torn away, two would be slaughtered every year in a spectacle of the absurd. 

Or, rather, the children of the Districts would be forced to slaughter each other.

 

~

 

This was how it happened.

“We should let Capitol citizens kill them,” said one overexcited delegate back then, in a world where the Hunger Games didn’t exist, if that was ever even possible. “Family members of the fallen.” 

Two other delegates looked at each other. He had always been such a hot head. He didn’t understand the subtly of ruling. How did they manage to win the war with such prominent idiots ruling?

“No, we shouldn’t,” another delegate said. “Killing the remaining prisoners and traitors, fine, let’s get citizens involved. Martyring their children? Really?” 

“Children of traitors aren’t _martyrs_ , Gaius –”

“Yeah, they should have thought about that before they rebelled against us –”

“It’s a good idea but there are too many children to kill, surely? Entire districts rebelled. Even the most prominent –”

The man who suggested it, in the end, was unknown. Small and nervous looking. Only included in meeting in the first place because of some vague politicking in his particular Ministry, to pacify some small faction. His name was not recorded to history.

“Maybe we should have them kill each other,” he said softly. “Have the districts kill their own children.”

One delegate snorted derisively. “Yeah, cause that won’t set off another rebellion!”

“Not all of them. Just one or two but every year. It’ll be a constant reminder of the debt they owe us. And they’ll never know if their children are safe, but they’ll know they probably are. And then if their child isn’t chosen, and most of them won’t be, they’ll be too grateful to us to even thinking about taking up arms. We could choose children of dissidents at first. Show them how easily we can kill their children like they killed ours.”

“What about the children of our allies? The merchants. They won’t be happy about this.”

“Well, we rig it, of course,” another delegate said easily. He was well experienced in rigging things. “We have some kind of system where the poorer they are the more likely they are to be chosen. That would correspond well with the most rebellious in most of the districts.”

“Yes, and frankly, the merchants were helpful in the war but I feel it’s time to break this alliance. We can’t allow ourselves to rely on them for control of the Districts.” 

“So, public executions of twenty-four children every year? That could work.” 

“You don’t understand the extent of public dissatisfaction, with all respect, sir.” A paunchy man from the Capitol’s west said. 

The west had taken most of the citizen casualties, bombarded by two, four and eight on three sides.

“People where I’m from want blood and vengeance. They want all the districts flattened and bombed to pieces like Thirteen. They want the children dead, _all_ of the children, and won’t understand why we’re being so soft and merciful. Doesn’t seem to occur to them who would do all the work with the districts gone or why we fought so hard to keep them under our control and in line, instead of just building a giant fucking wall around the Capitol, but I suppose that’s better. Two hangings a year in each District? I’m telling you, it won’t be enough.”

“Let’s get each pair of kids to fight each other to the death then, choose a boy and a girl and televise the close-ups. Will that be grisly and gory enough for them?” 

The one woman in the room spoke up. “The boy would always win. That wouldn’t be fair.”

“Not always, not if we gave them weapons. Lots of District girls are as good with a bow as their men.”

“My people want to take part in it. They want to kill the kids,” the delegate from the west said doggedly.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! They could provide the weapons.”

“Wait,” another delegate said. “So one kid kills the other? Who’s going to kill him?”

“The winners from the districts could fight each other. We could get them together in one place, televise that messy fight.” 

“Wouldn’t they just refuse to fight?”

“Nah. We could say the last one standing is the ‘winner’, give them a shiny crown and a few hundred sestericii. Never underestimate what people will do to win a crown.”

“So there’d be a survivor,” the delegate from the west stated.

“Yes, yes, Frank, we all know your people want these kid’s guts stapled to a post. Be realistic for a moment, would you, what are you going to do, we can’t kill all of them!” 

“And it’s an incentive to fight, isn’t it. Make it look good for the cameras. If you know one of you will definitely survive. It probably won’t be you, but hey, it could be...”

“I missed betting during the war. We could bet on the kids.”

The gavel rung. The chairman of the meeting, who never spoke during it, now proclaimed in his booming voice:

“It’s a good idea. But these kid’s parents aren’t all rounded up yet. Let’s focus on that and come back to this in a few months.”

The room went silent. Few of the people at that meeting knew then how it was the start of something momentous, something that would shape the Capitol’s post war society more than anything else. As the decades passed it was a badge of pride to boast you had been there and everyone and anyone claimed they were. The minutes were still classified so nobody really knew, and even some of the participants couldn’t remember the exact numbers and names. It was said a young Snow had been there.

~

So those who had wanted District children to be illiterate and uneducated forever lost their fight. Besides, those Commanders did allow, education in the Districts was also a way to placate the religious faction, who had been displeased and restive at their relative lack of importance in the post-war ruling arrangement, but who were still numerically and militarily strong. Give them the District children, the Commanders thought. Let them spread the realm’s religion in the harsh way they had always clamoured to. They had been useful enough in the coup against Morata.

Most of the Commanders and the ruling elite to which they belonged didn’t believe in any of Church’s teachings privately, but secularism was an unimaginable proposition and so public appearances had to be kept for the church’s support and their heavily armed civilian supporters among the Capitol’s population. 

Some of the more atheistic elite, including the general in charge immediately after the surrender – what a surrender it was! Most of those who surrendered as instructed on the field were shot immediately, hands still held high, but hadn’t they expected that and wouldn’t they have done the same if the positions had been reserved, all of those involved on both sides knew full well it was a fight to the death - laughed in delight at the irony.

Let religion be used against the people!

The confusion of the times had been shown in the religiosity of both sides during the war. The devoutly religious Districts had used their holy books and creeds to justify their rebellion, to the horror of the esteemed clergy. It was the Districts who had twisted the word of God first, into a moral rationale to rain down fire on innocents in the Capitol. During the Dark Days, district priests had carried guns and churches had shielded insurgents.

It would be fitting to watch as the religion of the masses was twisted into something unrecognisable, the brutal and dogmatic form of the Capitol religious faction – who were frankly mad, the Generals were happy for them to be shunted to the Districts - forced down their children’s throats.

Those rebels who hadn’t been executed – and there were few of them, the cowards who had turned tail at the last minute and helped deliver the final blow to their former comrades – would be forced to watch as their young were indoctrinated and their light in dark times used against them. And the best part was that they couldn’t say anything about it. Punishment for apostasy was, of course, death, and it was the Capitol that decided what was and wasn’t orthodox. 

So what the Capitol said went, and what they said God wanted, he wanted. Of course God would have been displeased with the Districts for rebelling and falling from grace! Of course there could never be crime without punishment. The districts had sinned, and the district children had to pay for the blood of their ancestors.

The high priest said a Sunday reaping would be blessed with blood and the Districts obeyed, as they always did. 

It was the height of indignation, not just to give up their children as they had to every year; but to have to believe it was holy. Never mind that Sunday as the day of rest was part of the contract between the subjects and the government. The people forsake their hours and labour, their skin and sweat, in return for that one day a week. Most did spend Sunday toiling, but it was toiling for themselves; in the field like any other day, bent down and sweating, but on Sunday their tired hands picked and sowed so their children could take less tesserae and break more bread. 

All empires run on consent as well as coercion. The prisons and the schools, the workhouses and the hospitals, the camps and the markets. Free education, stability, the knowledge that while you can’t hope for better for your kids, you know it will not be worse for them either. Bread, circuses and Sundays free to play with your kids, to run wild, to fish, to trade, to sit on your porch with friends, to just live. 

And the ever-present reminder they could always make it worse. They could always force the people to work all the time, not just most of it. 

They could, but they wouldn’t, because then what would they threaten the people with, coerce them with, _convince_ them with?

Taking away that day, that little bit of freedom, was a mistake, and showed just how far the new ruler would go to assert himself, mark the start of his reign, and distinguish himself from his father. 

The reaping had never before been held on Sunday before but Sunday reminded the people of sacrifice, and blood, after so many years, and perhaps it did make a certain perverse amount of sense.

~

The Emperor had just died and his son had ascended to the throne when the change was announced. The eldest son who had been destined for the crown since birth. There were whispers in the Capitol – not in the districts where nobody gave a damn whose boot was on their back – that the son was not fit to run an Empire. His advisors worried. They knew, as the former Emperor had understood, that there needed to be a civilised façade over the regime.

The father had killed carefully and prudently, sowing enough fear and division to strengthen his rule but not enough to allow his enemies to coalesce against him. His father before him had deftly done the same, balanced the different post-war coalitions against each other, watched as they destroyed each other, before moving in as the smoke drifted from the rubble, said that clearly the post-war arrangement was not working, that there was such instability and violence within the Capitol that it was only a matter of time before the Districts rose again... 

Even those who could see his clever speech for what it was, could assign the blame for the instability to his own instigation, were powerless to resist. The mere mention of the Districts and the possibility of them rising, still had enormous power ten years after their defeat. They were used to keep his enemies in line.

So the grandfather ruled to address the chaos he had caused. He was popular and well-liked with many in the Capitol, particularly the previously overlooked poor, as he oversaw economic expansion on the back of the re-subjugation and exploitation of the Districts. He provided free grain in exchange for slips of paper. He provided Sundays off.

And then he set in place a dynasty. Nobody saw it coming for the man despite all faults was a rational technocrat. Surely he understood birth alone did not qualify a man to rule – he had been born a peasant after all.

Most expected his able right-hand man, another veteran of the uprising, who had stood loyally by his side, to rule after his death or even after his retirement.

But time and events moved fast and he took advantage of it. A slippery announcement, at first... the post-war boom meant the population was growing, the twenty year commemoration of the armistice deserved an important announcement, things were going so well under his rule and it needed to be consolidated, there was no need to hand over the reigns of power to somebody else and unsettle things, destabilise them again, after all the pain and all the loss. A single figure could unify the fractious factions; the Districts could never be allowed to rise again.

He alone could save them.

The generals and the priests and the politicians retained some of their power but most of it flowed to him, now crowned emperor. Seventy years later, the son of the first emperor had played the same game and he played it well. He had never lost. He died with the crown on his head, by then the only outcome that mattered for his rule.

But the prodigal grandson was different.

Uninterested in economic figures and military balance of power, he stole girls on their wedding night and returned them hollow-eyed to their grooms the next morning. He built torture chambers and maimed children to force their fathers to confess to imaginary crimes. He filled football stadiums to hang traitors while jazz bands swung; he buried in concrete a wrestler who had lost his match.

He had beaten to death his father’s secretary at a glamorous party in front of horrified onlookers because the man had not laughed at his joke. The violence was so cruel and so random that it served no purpose in a modern Empire, particularly one where the citizens of the Capitol were supposed to be safe from the capricious violence needed to keep the subject population subjugated.

In the fine balance of consent and coercion needed to rule, he upended the scales.

The death of the secretary had been the final straw. His father had him exiled to District 2, ostensibly to oversee the electronics industry there, but everyone knew the huge disgrace it really was.

He knew it too; he was not that stupid. 

The Districts alone were unaware of the political machinations and intrigue occurring in the Capitol: they had no idea of, and even less interest in, what they perceived as the petty divisions of the Capitol, their lives being as wretched as they were.

A few like old Peter preached that these divisions were the _only_ crack in the Capitol’s fortress and that the one way to topple the whole regime was by uniting with some disaffected elements in the Capitol. But most scoffed at this. Their children were dying and it was the Capitol’s fault. How could anyone in the Capitol be innocent? How could any of them suffer under the regime like the Districts did? 

There would be no understanding between the workers of the district and the workers of the Capitol. Never any rapprochement or solidarity, forever enmity and division. The suffering in the Capitol was _nothing_ compared to the torment of the Districts, and those facing it could never forget that. 

His father was a dictator but the son was a monster. After he had been exiled to Two his father had quietly passed over him in the succession in favour of his younger brother. But the younger brother had not been seen in a few months and none dared to ask of him. He was clever so he might have got out in time, but nobody knew. The Emperor had died, officially of old age, although there were rumours he had been poisoned, and his son took over.

The King is dead, long live the King.

And thus, the new Emperor sought to mark the beginning of his reign. The Sunday reaping was announced and the laziness of the people derided. Quotas were introduced, new and completely unrealistic. There was a much maligned ban on cross-border district trade to address a supposed increase in insurgent activity at the borders; economists back in the Capitol were up in arms about efficiency and lost profit margins. He dissolved the Council of Reconciliation and sent the old functionaries representing the districts back to the homes they had not truly belonged to in decades.

The death announcement came on a Thursday evening; by Friday morning, the Emperor had convened a meeting of his father’s closest advisors and ministers. The Emperor lounged in military costume, idly tapping a pipe against the table, wearing honours he had never received, battlefields he had never been to. The highest military honour of all was pinned proudly to his chest, the one that had been bestowed on his grandfather’s closest companion. The general who had won the war and saved the land.

The Emperor stood as one by one the old men shuffled in and took their seats, faces grave. They were wearing their Sunday best, sharply pressed ties and polished shoes. They knew how new rulers marked the beginning of their reign and they had not been innocent in previous passages of power. 

And this time, they had bet on the wrong man. It was as simple as that.

His father’s best friend and chief advisor was the first called to the stage. Robert walked up stiffly, eyes straight ahead. An aristocratic sense of futility to his gait.

It was to send a message to all those in the audience and those who would later hear of it in hushed whispers, but it was a personal message too. The new Emperor Odai had always hated Robert. Robert had been condescending and belittling to him when he was a child, always making snide and hurtful remarks he knew Odai wouldn’t fully understand, laughing at him with his younger brother Quentin.

They had both thought they knew so much, but where was Quentin now?

Not here, presiding over the cavernous hall, that Odai had longed to call his since the day he first stepped in it as a seven-year-old. There was one thing he understood better than anyone, and it was how to rule through violence. Not how to rule well, nor for a long time perhaps, though they would see about that, but simply to rule.

Who needed consent. Coercion would work just as well.

The old man was shuddering, pathetic, as his watery eyes blinked furiously and his stooped back made him look like he was kneeling, supplicant. Weak, and the Emperor detested nothing else more.

“What’s wrong, sire?” Odai asked him calmly with fake concern to his tone. Like their roles had switched and this time Robert was the child and it was Odai who knew everything.

He imagined his father, late at night, swirling his glass of scotch, elbows propped up regally on his mahogany desk. Talking to Robert about the utter disappointment of his firstborn son. Robert, who was now kneeling so pitifully but back then walked with the air of a man with power, frowning and placating his father, telling him he had another son, one who could fulfil the duties expected of him. 

A flush of anger ran through Odai although he carefully controlled himself. He did not want to get too emotional but instead wanted to savour that the moment he had dreamed of for years was finally here. 

“I beg- I beg of you, your – your greatness.” 

Out in the audience, even old men who as young men had rained down fire on besieged villages during the latter days of the war turned away to avoid watching what came next.

After the Emperor had finished with Robert, he saw some looks of relief from those assembled, and was astonished that they really thought it was over.

He did not announce why he was calling the names as he began but when the armed guards suddenly appeared to escort them out, it became clear. Some pleaded; some let themselves be led in mute silence. A few beseeched him directly, defending their records and pledging their allegiance. Those who were still foolish enough to think he was capable of mercy. As each man was led out, spontaneous applause rang out.

Fervent cries of support rang the air, men standing up, hand clenched over their heart as tears sprang to their eyes, taking turns to praise the Emperor and his father and even his grandfather, and their rule, each more extravagantly than the last. It was a festival of confusion and hate and pleading. The air was tight and hot and oppressive. 

After the guilty had been removed, the cancer removed, the kingdom finally cleansed, the survivors relaxed and laughed, still smoking their pipes. Then they were led in groups outside, and handed a gun, and told what they were doing was to ensure the continuing glorious rule of the Capitol and the Emperor.

 

 

_I remember tears streaming down your face when I said I’ll never let you go_

 

Harry Evans was reaped on a Sunday.

His parents stood anxiously in the group of parents and older siblings, set slightly aside from the precise lines of children. That morning, after Harry had stayed over at his parent’s house and who cared what Vernon had to say about it, his mother had cooked his favourite breakfast, even giving him an extra slice of bread when he knew they really couldn’t afford it, while his father busily ironed Harry’s best clothes, whistling as he did so and periodically having to stop and wipe his glasses as the steam from the iron hissed up.

His mother had smiled reassuringly as she put the plate of food in front of him and told him that she had been scared too when it was her turn but it would be over sooner than he thought. Harry listened attentively and ate all of his breakfast from the chipped china plate, and then washed the dirty utensils without being asked while his mother dressed and his father went next door to take their elderly neighbour breakfast. 

Harry chopped firewood to fill up the dwindling supply in their log basket, trying to keep busy to avoid his racing mind, before dressing in his Sunday best. When his father returned and, fumbling, dropped his watch, the one he only wore on Reaping day and at funerals, the one that would soon be pawned, Harry bent down right there in the dust despite his fancy clothes in order to find it under the table. Harry couldn’t imagine how the quiet humdrum of their lives could ever be interrupted.

Harry had first smiled when he was a few hours old and although he was often serious and quiet, he was never sullen. He had an earnestness about him that made it clear he was kind-hearted and good-natured. He showed his love through actions mostly, willingly doing household chores for his parents and never complaining for all they could not give him while they in return gave him everything they possibly could.

If Harry had known it was the last happy morning he would ever have with his parents, he would have sat there in silence and taken it all in, committed it to memory, to draw upon in the coming days. Regardless, he did not take a moment of it for granted. He loved his parents with all he had.

His parents would come to regret that they had brought up such a sweet child because it made it so much harder when he had to leave them and it made the years after his loss so much harder. 

Harry was reaped on a Sunday. His best friend’s hand went straight to his shirt sleeve. Harry smiled reassuringly at Neville before detaching himself from his slippery fingers and walking towards the stage.

Even though he had just been reaped, he was perversely glad it was not Neville. Or anyone else. When considering the reaping Harry had thought that would be the worst bit: not being reaped, and having to watch as someone else, maybe someone you knew, hearing their mother weep, walk up to the stage. Watch them cry, or try not to, watch them tremble and hold their head high, watch them look terrified, or angry. Harry thought that would be the worst bit.

So when he walked up, he made sure to smile. He wanted to make it easy for Neville and Luna and his parents. He would let them cry for him. He focused on breathing, in and out, calm. His short nails dug into his palm, but that was all the concession he made to his emotions. Breath in, breath out. It’s okay. It’ll be okay. The escort smiled too, told him he was adorable, looking at him like he was a little kitten playing with a box, in a game he didn’t understand, entertaining those cleverer than him. 

Harry was reaped on a Sunday. His name was written on one slip of paper. He was twelve.

 

 

_I remember you said, don’t leave me here alone_

 

His goodbyes had to be short because he had so many visitors.

Luna and Neville came first and he said goodbye to them. Luna was the same as ever, dreamy and vague and Harry was grateful for it. She told him that she had seen in the stars he would come home, and he believed her. She gave him a kind of powder she said was unicorn horn, given willingly, and would protect him against any threat. It protects the innocent, she said. 

Neville was less helpful, or perhaps just as helpful depending on how one felt about the existence of unicorns. He could barely say a word. Harry told him it was alright, and Neville said unhappily, “What will we _do_ without you.”

Harry was so sorry to leave them. 

Neville could barely speak then and Harry apologised to him that they could not, as they had planned, go for a walk the next day to the marketplace to buy Neville another ball to replace the one he had lost. Neville whispered “But you’re the best friend I ever had,” and Harry fought a weird compulsion to say ‘only’, hugging him tight, although they both knew it was true. 

Harry said goodbye to his cousin who he had always been strangely fond of. Dudley struggled to understand what was happening as Harry made him promise to look out for Neville and not let his friends bully him, not to turn a blind eye like Harry knew he did but had never mentioned before out of a weird sort of uncertainty of how Dudley would react. Neither Petunia nor Vernon came and Dudley was so awkward about it Harry wanted to laugh and then cry. 

Harry said goodbye to a gaggle of his sort-of friends from school, Ernie and Susan and Terry, who had always been sweet and friendly to him. They had always been friendly to Neville, too. He would be fine.

His next door neighbour came next. Weirdly she clung to him and cried even more than his friends, thanking him for the gardening he had done in exchange for the flowers he picked to give to his mother. Mrs Figg from down the road came and didn’t let Harry get a word in edgeways as she talked about her cats and made him say goodbye individually to their pictures, wiping her tears distractedly away with a massive handkerchief; Harry was perversely grateful for the moment of quiet hilarity amidst the horror.

The butcher promised to make sure his parents always had meat on the table even during the Capitol’s Bi-Annual Meat Festival when meat was strictly requisitioned and rationed in the districts. The greengrocer said he would set up a collection and try his best to sponsor Harry. It was his youngest son’s last year; Harry said “I’m glad he wasn’t picked,” and meant it.

The baker came and made an even bigger promise than the greengrocer’s collection. Harry had regularly scraped together coins by picking up bottles and taking them to the head peacekeeper for a denarius each. Then he would take the coins to the baker faithfully every Saturday to exchange for the reduced loaves that were burnt and misshapen.

Harry would then trudge stolidly into the centre of the District, down by the market, where the down and out congregated, to give them the bread with butter he had saved up throughout the week from his school lunches, with little fuss and no expectation of anything in return. He gained no warm glow of satisfaction and did not look to God to make sure he noted it down.

His parents, if they had known, would not have approved about these trysts with the desperate but equally wouldn’t have really been surprised. Harry never told them for he didn’t like to add to their stress and worry.

The baker promised he would continue their tradition without payment, promised he would distribute every last scrap in Harry’s honour. And eventually, in Harry’s memory. He clasped Harry’s hand and cried. It made Harry uncomfortable because he almost never saw adults cry. At funerals. Reaping day, maybe. He supposed, after all, this was both of those occasions. The baker was plump and pink and his tears made him a comic figure, but Harry couldn’t laugh. He couldn’t cry, either, even if it was both reaping day and his funeral. He just held tight to the baker’s hand and told him he would try to win, although he didn’t know if he meant it. As the baker turned to leave, he remembered to ask after his two little boys who adored Harry, the cute children with the big eyes and blonde hair, who clung to the baker’s legs as his wife shouted at him and the baker said fiercely “God bless you, Harry.”

Time was running out and Harry worried. Where were his parents? Everyone knew the strict and cruel punctuality of the Capitol. Once, when Harry was very young, Neville’s mother and father (both in their last eligible year, baby Neville held tightly in his praying grandmother’s arms in the crowd, and that at least was one victory for reaped pregnant girls were always forced to have an abortion) had both been reaped in one of those unfortunate coincidences that often came after a boring year.

Harry’s parents, old schoolmates of theirs, had done their best after that to look after Neville, and the boy’s friendship was born in the quiet hours playing together when Neville had been dropped off at Harry’s parents house when he was there too by his longsuffering grandmother who, in her own words, was too damn old to raise another child. 

The pair got their last sad goodbye with their son, and Neville’s father with his mother but Alice’s parents were essential staff in the hospital on reaping day. They got to the square five minutes too late; the train had not yet pulled out of the station but permission to visit them was denied anyway. 

Harry didn’t know why he was thinking of this now as it was so far gone as to be ancient history and totally irrelevant to his situation. His parents had definitely been in the square when he was reaped, he had sought their gaze just before his reaping, although after he had been called as he stood on the stage he had stared out resolutely into the open sky above the town, not daring to look into the crowd. Into the faces of everyone he loved. There were any number of sensible answers for why they weren’t currently in the room; they were probably talking to his mentor, making sure he would do his best by Harry. They would be coming in a minute, certainly. 

Finally, his parents entered. His father was hysterical, his mother steely faced.

He didn’t know what to say. Was it really just last night that they had all sat by the flickering fire light, under their one woollen blanket, his father reading, his mother dozing and Harry studying both their features intently, their faces softened by the evening glow and his love for them. 

He had traced his father’s serious gaze as his broken glasses perched precariously at the end of his nose, his mother’s flickering eyelashes, the shadows that danced on her pale face. He would remember their faces forever, he knew, until the day he died, but he had never imagined that day would be so soon. He had hoped desperately and unrealistically he could live like a child forever, waking up in the morning with the sure certainty he had always taken for granted; that his parents would be there. 

Was it really just this morning he had sat at the breakfast table and his mother had served him his favourite breakfast, and rested her hand on his head for a moment before telling him not to worry, that she had been scared too but it would all be over before he knew it. 

He had never thought he would actually be reaped.

He hugged them and said “Don’t cry, Dad.”

His father wiped his face. Harry passed him his handkerchief. His mother stroked his hair.

“Oh, darling.”

“I don’t think I’ll be coming home,” Harry said quietly.

“I know,” James said. “I know.” 

“But it’s okay if you do, love.” Lily said. Lily had brought up a boy who would never even consider killing anyone, would never consider it an option, would sacrifice himself happily, and Lily hated herself in that moment.

There was a tight clenching somewhere in Harry’s chest, and he could barely breathe. His clutched his mother harder.

Harry smiled through his tears despite himself as his parents left. He didn’t want to cry because he didn’t want that to be their last memory of him but he couldn’t help it.

He wanted to cling to them and never let go, but he didn’t, knowing it would be his parents that paid for his stubbornness, and to Harry it was grossly unfair for somebody to pay for somebody else’s mistake. 

His mother had stopped crying, pursed face and pale, looking uncannily like her sister, but his father was still crying silently, handkerchief pressed to his face. They left, a small distance between them, although to Harry it seemed a cavern, wide and unknown, arms clasped around themselves instead of each other.

He had taken so much from his parents although rationally he knew none of it was his fault or choice; their youth and their hope, their time and their money. He knew it was ridiculous, that he gave them as much as he had taken, but he had still always felt some weird kind of guilt that children so often feel that he could barely define even to himself, and he could never talk to them about it. Now he would never be able to. 

They had given him everything they had. He just hoped he didn’t take them from each other.

 

 

_Yesterday we were just children_

 

He was called Ron and he was twelve too. They became friends immediately. A blonde boy around Harry’s age with a pointed chin had come up to Harry, arrogant like District 4 so often were, and had announced to Harry that he was a Career and they should be allies. Harry had laughed, thinking he was joking, that such a young boy would never be a Career, before realising he was serious, but it was too late. He had burned his bridges without realising it and the boy had stalked off, offended. Harry was momentarily struck with worry about being impolite, what the boy would think of him – worse, what he might do to him in the Arena because of it. 

He heard sniggering, and looked around to see a redheaded boy. He sauntered up to Harry and said: “Don’t mind him. You wouldn’t want to ally with him anyway. He’s a _Malfoy_.”

That didn’t mean anything to Harry but he nodded quickly anyway. He stood flushed and silent, wishing desperately that no-one else would notice him.

So began their friendship.

The red-head introduced himself as Ron Weasley, “blimey it’s weird to be somewhere where nobody immediately knows I’m a Weasley.” 

He smiled at him, lifting his eyebrows and making a face when Malfoy talked loudly about the nerve of some people.

He looked so funny Harry laughed too. He was so different to Neville it was easy not to compare them. Harry was fascinated by his large family and Ron loved to hear Harry’s old school tales; his family were so poor they could only put the brightest of his older brothers through school and had to homeschool the rest. 

Harry puffed with pride as Ron told him his mother would love Harry, and Harry said his father would be impressed at how Ron could cut an entire tree to branches in a day because a similar task had taken Harry almost an entire weekend. 

The arrogant boy, Malfoy, was young too. In fact, looking around, Harry didn’t think there was anyone older than fourteen there. Even the Careers, as Harry now knew. Harry was curious, wondering whether it really was an accident, or whether the Capitol decreed it. He wouldn’t be surprised. Last year was boring, everyone said so. There were long and – ironically - boring articles in the Capitol papers smuggled in and passed around the District about the financial implications of such a dull year and the declining viewership and the low returns on sponsorship. Most people skipped that article and went straight to the more salacious Capitol gossip but Harry was keenly interested in the world he lived in and read every scrap of news he could get avidly, just like his parents did. He grew up with interesting conversation around the dinner table the one day a week he ate with his parents about what was happening outside their District. Not many dinner tables in Three saw that; certainly the Dursleys never talked about the world.

His father had read the article after him and had pondered darkly over his boiled potatoes and cabbage how it would affect the next Hunger Games. Harry supposed they were now finding out. 

He spent a moment, but only a brief one, wondering how the young age would affect the Games. If viewers would hesitate, faced with the undeniable evidence that they were all just children, sent to fight and kill for no reason but to avenge a war fought almost before living memory. If it would stir anyone’s conscience. Probably not. Most would be excited. 

Those who would care would probably watch it on TV, say “Oh, that’s horrible,” and go right back to eating breakfast.

The night of the reaping, the tributes had dinner with the Emperor. Harry knew who he was from the pictures hanging in his schoolroom and in the Church. They didn’t have his picture in their home. It wasn’t mandatory but some people did. Ron told Harry about how his older brother, the one who had gone to school until he was eighteen and then onto the Capitol as an assistant liaison for his district, put up the emperor’s picture in his bedroom and Ron’s other two elder brothers had burned the eyebrows off it and their parents didn’t even punish them, just pursed their lips and told them all to stop arguing about it at the dinner table in front of Ron and his younger sister.

There were no mentors or escorts present, just the children and the emperor with his bodyguards standing discreetly in the background. The tables held a feast: honeyed figs, stuffed vine leaves, citrus fruit and lamb in mint sauce. The Emperor sat at the head of the table and politely engaged the tribute in conversation he evidently believed was appropriate but that made Harry shy away from for reasons he didn’t really understand and wouldn’t have been able to articulate.

The Emperor was charming; laughing and joking with the careers and more boisterous outer district tributes, offering them all personal advice on the arena, even giving away a few confidential details in an ostensibly accidental manner. The emperor poured drinks amiably and kissed the girls’ hands, almost bowing. Even Hermione blushed and smiled prettily when the emperor told her he was very impressed that she could identify the provenance of the wine. 

Nonetheless, Harry didn’t like or trust him; there was something cruel about the set of his mouth and the coolness of his eyes, and the way they only became engaged when a tribute was humiliated or made a mistake.

The sole eleven-year-old in the group, Colin, couldn’t contain his excitement at the meal. He had gone hungry all his life, the son of a fruit picker in Seven who had never been allowed to try so much as a morsel of fruit. The emperor smiled kindly at him as he piled his plate high. More fruit was brought out for pudding, and Colin warily tried and then enthusiastically gulped down grapes. 

“I’ve never had them before!” Colin exclaimed innocently. Beside Harry, a girl with frizzy brown hair, Hermione, who had spent most of the meal engaged in a lively argument with the boy from Seven about the likelihood of a cold versus hot arena, sucked in her breath sharply at Colin’s comment. 

“What do you mean?” The Emperor said just as sharply. “Every family who wants them has grapes!”

Colin wavered, his mouth hung open in confusion, unsure of what he had said and what to respond. Ron jumped in and deflected like he had done for Harry, making a careless and easy joke. 

The conservation moved on but Harry noticed the emperor seemed to remain angry, staring at Colin for too long before resuming a frosty conversation with Malfoy who was trying too hard to impress him. Harry was shocked; did the Emperor really truly believe the District children _ever_ got to eat grapes?

Soon after that the Emperor asked the table of children what they thought about Dumbledore. Some of the children, the very poorest like Ron who had never been to school, didn’t even know he was. Those who did, like Harry, were unsure of what to say. After a moment of silence Hermione spoke up.

“Dumbledore was a man who rolled down from the hill of power as fast as he ran up it.”

“Are you referring to Dumbledore or are you referring to Dumbledore?” Odai asked and Harry felt all of the air leave the room.

Hermione cowed. Harry thought she was used to her opinion being respected by those superior to her but she had misjudged the situation and the Emperor. 

Odai abruptly left soon after, excusing himself and not bothering to give a reason. A long tense silence followed which Malfoy broke through a mouthful of food.

“The Emperor knows my father, you know.” 

He chewed on a chicken leg, unconcerned, as Hermione stared at him open mouthed in disgust. Harry wondered meanly – although, as it turned out, correctly– just what Draco’s father had done to make the Emperor so mad.

 

 

_Everybody’s waiting, everybody’s watching_

 

Throughout training, Harry stayed by Ron’s side. Ron made him laugh and they seemed to be by turns hopeless and competent at exactly the opposite stations so they were able to help each other easily. Harry didn’t mind being so bad at fighting; he could run and was thrilled to have a friend.

He wanted to tell Ron about Neville and the fun they had together but his throat closed up before he could get anything out. Ron smiled understandingly and launched into a long spiel about his brothers and the harmless horrors they had made him undergo growing up and he missed them, of course, but also kind of not, and did Harry think that was weird.

The friendship was so welcome to Harry and the talk so refreshing that Harry forgot where he was and only when Ron described the ways he and his younger sister got back at his older brothers and Harry thought ‘I wish I could meet her,’ did he remember with a start. If he ever did meet the younger sister she would hate him for surviving when her brother did not.

Hermione came up to them the second day when they were setting traps and told Ron, high pitched and bossy, that he was doing it all wrong.

She then turned her correcting eyes to Harry. “Yours is okay, I suppose, but you should pull this bit much tighter.”

The attention made Harry uncomfortable. He was shy and reticent, especially among such domineering people. At home, everyone knew his parents and uncle and aunt and treated him almost as an extension of them and he was perfectly happy in their shadow. 

Ron made a face at him. Harry just smiled in response, thanking Hermione politely while very purposefully turning away from her.

A familiar voice made him look up. Malfoy was looming over them, eyes trained on Hermione. “Leave it, princess, no-one likes a girl telling them what to do.”

Ron looked uncomfortable but stayed silent.                                                     

Hermione was momentarily stricken but then said sharply, “You should be careful, Malfoy. Your father isn’t here to protect you. In fact, I read in the newspaper he was imprisoned for being a traitor.”

Malfoy moved forwards so quickly Harry had no time to do anything. He pinned Hermione against the wall, her wide eyes all Harry could see of her face. She was still holding Ron’s imperfectly tied trap. The bit he had struggled to tie up correctly hang limply, exposing the sharp metal edge. She pressed it into Malfoy’s arm hard and he howled dramatically and clutched his arm, letting go of her.

Harry gaped at her but Hermione was cool. She smiled and flipped her hair, tangling it even more. “Sorry,” she said in a breezy tone to the stone faced Peacekeepers who didn’t seem to care what had happened as they roughly pulled Malfoy out of the room while he moaned. “It was an accident.”

Both Ron and Harry stared at Hermione in awe. Her smile became a little nervous as she held up Ron’s trap and she said “I suppose this isn’t so bad after all,” and they all laughed and became friends. 

Harry was impressed by Ron’s steadfadness, his loyalty to and love for his family and friends. He delighted every time he managed to make Ron laugh. Hermione’s intelligence was just as impressive, running cold with intensity and warm with passion. He thought she knew everything worth knowing and the fact that she had decided he was worth being friends with made him smile alone at night in his room.

In her interview the next evening, Hermione whirled a lock of hair around her finger and giggled. She smoothed her hands nervously on her simple white dress. She had brushed her hair and she looked much younger than Harry had noticed.

“You seem very kind,” Caesar said delicately at the end of the interview, after fifteen minutes of giggling and light-hearted chatter. By this point Harry realised it was deliberate. He was sure Hermione was eye rolling in her head about the inane conversation as she pretended to be a naive and simple little girl.

He admired how good she was at pretending to be someone she was not; was there anything she was not good at?

Although he personally thought she should have ran rings around Caesar and shown her blistering intelligence to win sponsorships, but he supposed she knew what she was doing. Harry wasn’t a girl and hadn’t spent a lifetime watching as boys and men were threatened by her intelligence – if they even recognised it in the first place. 

Ceasar continued. “Now, don’t get me wrong, I think you’re very sweet but there may be some out in the audience, watching now, who will wonder how you will fare in the arena.”

Hermione smiled, showing all of her teeth. “I think there’s a lot of brutality in kindness,” she said.

The audience watched impassively and then applauded politely as she walked off the stage but Harry was dumbstruck by what she had said; it whirled in his head, over and over, the clean truth put into dirty words. Or was it the dirty truth put into clean words? 

Harry, like most good people do, directed his piercing questions at himself and not at others who more strictly deserved it: was he brutal when he was kind? What was the solution? Should be stop being kind? Or just stop pretending that it was indeed kindness?

He did not mention his thoughts to Hermione. Everything that she had needed to say she had said, and Harry knew nobody could help him untangle the mess of thoughts in his head.

Really, he needed a parent to tell him that he was good, that he tried to do good, and that had to be enough.

The night before the Arena, Harry said awkwardly to Ron and Hermione, both sitting cross-legged on his bed, “So, uh, are we going to, um, in the Arena...” 

He looked up to Ron and Hermione sharing an amused glance.

“Are we going to what, kill each other in the bloodbath tomorrow? I don’t know, Hermione, how do you feel about killing me?” Ron turned to her as he pretended to thrust a sword into his stomach.

“Well, it’s not the _first_ thing on my to-do list... maybe the second,” Hermione laughed.

Harry smiled uncertainly at first before beaming. “So, we’re allies, then?”

“We’re friends, Harry,” Hermione said, serious now. “We’ll stick together.”

Ron nodded in agreement.

Hermione lingered after Ron, yawning, had ambled off to bed.

“I meant what I said, Harry.” Hermione said. She smiled sadly. “There’s a lot of brutality in kindness. But you’re not the only one who has to sacrifice.” 

The facts of their meeting meant it felt like they had been friends all their life; they understood each other intimately.

Harry knew Hermione knew of his plan. Harry had been planning on sacrificing himself at the right moment so one of Ron and Hermione survived. He couldn’t choose between Ron and Hermione, but he had a feeling he wouldn’t have to. Whatever happened, he did not plan on leaving the arena.

He couldn’t say anything to Hermione to reassure her. He said goodnight instead, and settled into bed for a restless sleep.

The next day, Harry was positioned next to Hermione on his podium. He looked but couldn’t see Ron; from her vantage point Hermione could see him on the other side of the star shaped platform. They had planned to run away from the bloodbath as fast as they could west and meet up when they could, but when the gong rang, Hermione shouted something at Harry before sprinting away from him, towards the Cornucopia. 

What? What had she said? Did she want Harry to follow her? Why wasn’t she running away like they had planned to? 

As an axe flew in the air and narrowly missed Harry’s ears, he knew he had to move. He ducked behind a spoke of the podium, ignoring the rushing of blood in his ears, trying to calm down and decide what to do. He heard terrified screams. He knew he needed to get up but he didn’t want to see exactly how desperate twelve year olds killed each other. 

He had just decided to go after Hermione when she appeared in front of him, frustrated. He noticed she was wearing a stupidly large brown backpack; she must have found it at the Cornucopia.

“Harry, what are you doing? I said to find Ron! Come on!”

Ron had followed the plan when he didn’t see either of them and had run west. He was easy to spot because there were few trees on the horizon. The arena was a savannah, hot and dry with identical waterholes dotted around erratically. There was also a small area of marshland to the east of the Cornucopia.

Harry noted, with satisfaction, Hermione had won her argument with Seven. Ice cold was too boring and this was a special year. People would want to see the twelve-year olds fighting in graphic detail. It was true spilt blood looked good on the ice but the sun of the savannah splayed everything it touched in a beautiful cinematic glow. 

They joined Ron and continued quickly onwards, finally relaxing at a small waterhole far away enough from the Cornucopia that it glinted dully in the distance. The sun was setting. They sat there, panting, for a while before Harry thought to ask why Hermione had gone into the Cornucopia and what was in the package that she had laid down carefully next to her.

She was dismissive. “Oh, it’s nothing. I hope it’ll help us.”

Ron, who hadn’t been there, didn’t seem to think it was a big deal either. “Leave it, Harry. Are you eating that?” he said, pointing to Harry’s uneaten fruit bar they had each been given in the pocket of their sand coloured safari outfits. 

“You can have it,” Harry said, pushing it towards him, still thinking about the package. It was large and bulky, and Hermione had struggled at the end to run with it. 

But in the morning, Harry too forgot the mysterious brown package. There was too much going on; plans to decide on, maps to draw, theories to theorise. Hermione was talking and talking about the arena, trying to figure it out. Harry could generally keep up with her, trained by years of crosswords and his parent’s conversation. His parents had always talked to him as if he was an adult with opinions they respected.

The trio had stayed up late the night before, waiting for the faces of the dead. Colin was the first face on the screen: all the Careers had survived. Hermione had quietly gasped at the sight of Colin’s open and trusting face. Harry felt a rustle and looked over to see Ron holding Hermione’s hand, face soft. He felt suddenly, intensely alone.

Fifteen tributes were already dead. It turned out desperate twelve year olds killed each other very efficiently.

They spent the day at their waterhole. The advantage of the arena meant they could see anyone coming, but they scanned the horizon in vain. Nobody was coming. They supposed anyone who would have been foolish enough to wander around in the heat of the day was already dead. Hermione decided the Careers were to the east by the marshland, at the huge waterhole set around the Cornucopia, splitting up supplies and gathering information before heading out to round up the remaining surviving tributes. Harry and Ron readily agreed in the absence of any conflicting information.

At sunset, the day cooled a little, settling around them gently. They had their plan ready: they had agreed the Careers would make their move at night when it would be much easier to sneak up on people. The Careers would methodically check every water hole. It would take them a while to get to their one, but they would eventually. The three of them couldn’t fight the Careers and win but they could outsmart them. In the cover of darkness, they planned to dig into the loose soil, creating a pit that they would lure the Careers into. 

Hermione called it learning from their ancestors. Ron called it ingenious, looking at Hermione with awe. It was a good plan but they had barely began digging at sundown when they felt vibrations. The sun was setting too fast, almost accelerating as it dove down.

They looked up to see lions and rhinos and hippos and crocodiles and other creatures Harry couldn’t name, a veritable zoo procession, making their way, sedately, towards their waterhole and therefore towards them. In the distance, Harry could see them making their slow procession towards every other waterhole, at exactly the same distance. The beasts had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

“ _Oh_ ,” Hermione said, sounding more interested than scared as a giraffe passed within a whisker of her, seemingly ignoring her.

“That’s an understatement!” Ron yelled. “Run, now!”

They ran, which was a mistake. It broke the animals out of their trance: they turned wild and savage, galloping towards the trio, tusks and teeth and claws out. Harry noticed there were no creatures around the Cornucopia’s lake and despite believing the Careers to be there, he steered them that way.

Hermione yelped, tripping over a tree root. A snapping hippo came closer and closer to her. Ron, the fastest runner, reversed course, running back to her, but he wasn’t going to make it so Harry willed his feet to move faster, pretended he was running from Dudley’s friends when they spotted him alone, hand outstretched, as Hermione tried to clamber up and put up her hand to shield her face – Harry grabbed her other hand and pulled her along, but it wasn’t enough. The hippo was upon them and Harry could smell its fetid breath, could hear his beating heart, and even though he knew hippos didn’t actually eat people, only snapped them in half with their gaping mouths, it was not much consolation – and then it was gone.

He and Hermione stood still, in their half crouches, hands held up protectively for all the good it would do them. Only when Ron finally reached them, pulling them both into a hug, half laughing and half gasping, did they open their eyes and see that not only the hippo but all the animals had disappeared, from their waterhole and all of the others too.

“What the hell!” Ron shouted. “What – _what_ was that?”

Hermione had recovered, although Harry still could not speak, panting and heaving. “They go after you only if you move, and they’re only here for five minutes, that’s _interesting_ , we’ll have to see if exactly the same happens tomorrow, I think it will, what do you think would have happened if we didn’t disturb them when they got to the waterhole -”

Hermione talked and talked while Harry willed his traitorous heart to calm down so he could join in the speculation. Ron was in a good mood, willing to half-seriously answer Hermione’s queries and debate with her. After a while, they noticed Harry’s stillness. They came closer to him, nudging him with their knees.

Hermione quietly thanked him for trying to save her and not leaving her. He smiled back at her. It was Hermione’s role to be clever and figure out everything about the arena out and it was Ron’s role to make jokes and keep them sane while she did that and it was his role to sacrifice himself for them when the time came so they could survive.

The days went by. Hermione keenly studied all of the patterns of the Arena. Every sunset, the animals would come out and as the sky became fully dark – Harry had never seen it so dark, the Capitol hated darkness in the Districts as plots and treason against it could easily hide in the shadows – they disappeared. They were perfectly peaceful if undisturbed but when alerted to a human’s presence would chase like a rabid dog.

After the first day Ron said “So, we just don’t go near the waterholes at sunset? Easy!” and Hermine replied, “I don’t think it’ll be that easy.”

They were still drinking the water that had been provided in the pocket of their safari outfit. It ran out the next day.

Harry volunteered to go to the waterholes when they knew it was safe, in the middle of the day and fill their bottles. Out of an abundance of caution they were avoiding the waterholes at all times of day. Apart from wild animals, it would be easy for another Tribute to lay a trap there as they still had half formed plans to do. 

Harry quickly filled the three water bottles and balanced them in his arms before turning back to where Hermione and Ron were hiding in the shade of a lonely bush. About halfway back through the long walk – another thing Hermione had insisted on for safety, in case they were being followed, or something, Harry hadn’t argued – Harry felt a burning pain in his hands and dropped the bottles on instinct. Swearing, scrabbling on his knees, hoping no water had spilled, he almost noticed too late the bottles were corroding, actually being eaten by the water inside. He realised what was happening immediately. The water was toxic and undrinkable. 

If Hermione was not scrupulously careful, if Harry hadn’t had the long walk back to them and hadn’t resisted the temptation to drink immediately, they would have been killed. It was clever.

He wondered how many Tributes had fallen for it – and honestly, what had the three of them been thinking?

Waterholes, everywhere. Of course they were a trap. Nothing was that easy in the Arena. They had just been so happy that something was actually easy for once they didn’t stop to question it.

The Careers wouldn’t have been poisoned, Harry thought glumly. They wouldn’t go near the waterholes apart from to hunt. They would have a stockpile of bottled water taken from the Cornucopia. 

Harry finally got back to Ron and Hermione. He told them what had happened. Ron looked unhappy and Hermione was even more grave as she pointed out something Harry hadn’t even considered. “And now we don’t even have water bottles if we do find some safe water.”

“Well, that’s our number one priority now. Finding water,” Hermione said with a resigned sigh and they agreed.

It was Hermione who eventually figured it out. She sat up in the middle of the night, although nobody was really sleeping. Everyone had liked Patrick and his smiling photo had lit up the sky that night.

“I know how to get water!”

Ron was already standing before she had even finished the sentence. “Great, let’s go. I’m so thirsty I’m fantasising about drinking my own blood.”

“Hang on, Ronald,” Hermione said in an amused tone. “It’s not that easy, unfortunately.”

Ron groaned and said “What is?” but dropped back down, resting on his elbows and waiting intently for her to go on.

“So, every sunset the animals come out, right? And then they disappear. And the water is toxic, as Harry found out.”

Harry nodded.

“But it can’t be toxic _all_ the time. The Careers are all alive, and that’s fine, that makes sense, we all know they’ll have their own water supply. And maybe a few of the others have dug down for wells and been successful, although god knows when we tried we didn’t find anything. And maybe some have been given water by sponsors. But surely not everybody can have done so. I mean, Ariana is still alive! There’s no way she has sponsors. None of the trees in this arena have water stores, I’m positive. So how is she still alive? Or Oliver? Or Angelina? There must be a way to get potable water. The waterholes are the obvious source.”

“But they’re toxic, Hermione, I’m telling you, you didn’t see the way they destroyed the bottles –” Harry protested.

“All we know is that they’re toxic at approximately 2pm in the afternoon. When we infer from that that they’re toxic _all the time_ , we’re making a mistake.”

Harry finally realised what Hermione was getting at. “You think the water is okay some of the time?”

“Exactly,” Hermione said with relish. “Think about the one place we _won’t_ be at sunset. At the waterhole. So it makes sense that that’s the only time the water is actually drinkable.” 

Ron made a noise of protest. “No way. I am not putting myself in between a hippo and its water and ending up a midnight snack! No bloody way.”

“For now, we need to confirm our theory,” Hermione said thoughtfully. “And then we can go back to our original plan, remember, with the traps. They were originally traps for wild animals, after all.” 

The next night, Ron waited nervously by the waterhole. During the long heat of the day they had fashioned a basic water bottle from a tree using the knives in their safari kit and Ron clutched it tightly, half-wishing he hadn’t volunteered for the task. 

He longed to fill it and get out of there but Hermione had stressed they had to wait for the right moment. As soon as the animals appeared, a five-minute walk from the waterhole if they weren’t disturbed into galloping, he dunked the water bottle to fill it, making sure not to allow his hand contact with the possibly-toxic-possibly-not water. 

His brief movement did set the animals off as if he had tripped a switch; they raced towards him but he hadn’t paused after filling the bottle and easily got away from them.

He got to where Harry and Hermione were anxiously waiting out of the beast’s range - which they had carefully plotted during the preceding days - and brandished the water bottle at them. Some water slopped out onto his hand but nothing happened, the skin remained undamaged. Hermione took it from him and carefully set it down on the ground. 

“How long was it before it went bad, Harry?”

“Um, I dunno. About twenty minutes, maybe?”

Hermione frowned. “But what if it’s only drinkable during the five minute period or –”

“There’s too many what ifs,” Ron said, still sweaty and flushed from his run, doubled over. “It’ll either kill us or it won’t. We’ll die without water anyway.”

Half an hour passed in silence before Hermione abruptly took a sip of the water without speaking. Harry wanted to protest but couldn’t; someone had to try it after all.

Hermione swallowed, her eyebrows knitted together and there was silence for a moment before she said slowly, “Well, I’m about seventy per cent sure it’s not going to kill us.”

Harry concurred. “The water I got before, it would have burned your insides out, the way it corroded the bottle.”

“Good enough for me!” Ron said and took the bottle. He offered it to Harry next, but Harry declined. “You did the running, Ron, you can have mine.”

“Harry -” Hermione said but he turned away and she fell silent. He was just trying to protect them. His parents knew he wasn’t going to be going home; knew it would kill him to do what he would have to do to survive. He would honestly rather die.

Talk turned to their next actions. They knew the animals could be outrun with the full five-minute head start, knew the water collected during the five minutes was indeed safe drinking water.

“We’re assuming an awful lot,” Hermione said with a frown. “But Ron’s right, we can’t plan for every contingency. Let’s go for it. Once we have a water supply, I’ll be a lot less worried.” 

“Shouldn’t we be being, you know, hunted?” Ron said, rather unconcerned, as he set the empty water bottle down. “I mean, where the hell is everybody?”

“Probably trying to get water, too,” Harry said.

“Not the Careers,” Hermione said with conviction. “They’ll be hunting. They just haven’t found us yet. It’s a big arena. The biggest yet, I think. Everyone else is steering clear hoping the animals will get everyone else and they’ll win by sheer chance. I think I saw Ariana, actually. It was definitely a person and I’m pretty sure it was her. She ran when she saw us coming.”

“You didn’t tell us?” Ron asked. 

“I didn’t know what you would do,” Hermione said, her voice uncertain, betraying she knew it was stupid to keep that information from them. 

“We’ll have to fight at some point, we can delude ourselves all we want, but the peacekeepers won’t let the winner win without killing this year,” Ron said, more gently than Harry would have thought. Harry shuddered, but knew Ron was right. The peacekeepers would make the twelve-year-old who eventually won lose their innocence for the cameras.                                  

“I _know_ ,” Hermione said rather crossly and nothing more was said for a while. 

The silence persisted into the afternoon of the next day but when they started to plan their next steps they all forgot the awkwardness although words of forgiveness remained unspoken.

It didn’t take long to dig a trap wide enough and deep enough to trap all of the animals now they had water supplies. They dug it about halfway between the appearing point of the animals and the waterhole. They wanted to make sure they had time to run if anything went wrong. 

They were in their positions long before sunset, Ron and Harry with their long legs by the waterhole and Hermione keeping watch a little further away. They had spent the day fashioning large water boxes. 

They couldn’t take too much water within the five minutes because they would have to carry it and couldn’t risk leaving any out for another tribute to find. While they would hopefully have plentiful water shortly, the trail mixes and protein bars they had been provided with were running low and nobody wanted to have to bring down an animal, the only potential source of food in the arena.

At this stage, food would be an expensive gift for sponsors although as Hermione’s intelligence became clear they had gotten some lightweight water bottles that Hermione said would keep water cool even in the midday sun. Harry was tense by the waterhole, thinking it would be the perfect time for the gamekeepers to nudge a Career or two in their direction but no attack came. 

“Go!” Hermione shouted as the animals appeared. She began counting. Harry and Ron frantically filled the boxes and bottles. Harry tried to calm down, because in his haste it was easy to waste too much water as it slopped over and percolated into the ground, but he couldn’t keep his hands from trembling.

Hermione reached two minutes. Soon the animals would be reaching the pit.

When Hermione started screaming, Harry knew it hadn’t worked. He didn’t spare a glance at the animals, just grabbed what he had managed to fill and ran. Along the frantic route, he lost almost all of the water as he careened wildly towards the boundary that the animals could not pass. They made it easily and Harry sank to the floor.

“Fuck,” Ron swore. Harry was too tired to say anything but he wholeheartedly agreed. Ron had managed to preserve much more of his water supply than Harry had but even so, the water would run out within the next few days.

Hermione reached them and pulled Harry up. She was brisk. “Okay, so we know that won’t work. Damn. I was so sure...”

“What happened?” Harry asked, still gasping.

“Oh, the pit disappeared,” Hermione said. Both Ron and Harry made a noise of surprise.

“Yes,” Hermione continued. “It looked like a hole but they walked over it like it was still solid ground.”

Hermione was still upbeat, saying at least they got more information, that the plan hadn’t worked but the next one might and there must be a way of getting food, they just had to figure it out.

As the days went by, either the animals or the careers killed the other tributes, and after Ariana was killed days went by with no more cannons. Soon the trio felt hunted and weak with hunger, although Harry managed to identify some edible plants.

Harry began to jump at shadows. He thought that the Careers were being deliberately kept away from the three of them because the Peacekeepers, or more likely the audience, were curious to see where Hermione’s planning would lead them. 

Hermione, who had apparently read many books about wildlife and identified most of the creatures Harry couldn’t, picked up a strange fixation with the way the animals were acting. She ruminated on it every evening. They were weak and sick from their dehydration by that point and getting on each other’s nerves.

“Well, what do you expect?” Ron eventually said in exasperation. “They’re animals! Of course they’re acting like animals! Considering their normal state is trying to kill us, why does it even matter.”

“Yes, Ronald,” Hermione said, not noticing or not caring about his tone. Harry was generally the slowest to anger but sometimes Hermione when she was deep in thought wasn’t bothered by the most obvious provocations.

“Exactly. Why are they acting like animals and only triggered by movement? Why don’t they have, I don’t know, super enhanced smell to find us? Every other animal in any Games I’ve seen – and I’ve _seem them all_ – has had something modified about it. That’s the point, that’s why it’s so scary – or entertaining to the Capitol.”

There was silence for a little while longer. Harry rubbed two rocks against each other idly, struggling to keep his eyes open.

“They’ve gone for a natural arena,” Hermione said thoughtfully, running a piece of grass between her fingers.

“Huh?” Ron said.

“No magic, no tricks, no technology. Well, apart from the disappearing act at nightfall. Nothing but old-fashioned monsters.”

“Is that good or bad?” Harry asked.

“There are a lot of natural horrors,” Hermione answered in a measured tone. “But I think it’s good, on balance.”

“I still don’t know what you mean,” Ron muttered.

“Everything here that can kill us actually exists in our world. Nothing has been modified or mutilated or programmed. The gamemakers aren’t controlling anything. They’ve dumped us in here with the animals and that’s it. We’re so lucky they’re only here for five minutes, can you imagine if they were just roaming around? We’d all be stuck up a tree. The same tree.”

“Yeah, we’d be hacking at each other in the branches,” Harry said, suddenly glad for the arena they got; it could have been a lot worse. 

“I don’t know why they didn’t do that. This can’t be that exciting,” Ron said.

“Well, you haven’t seen any of the deaths, have you?” Hermione pointed out distractedly. “Probably too many of us would die too quickly if the animals were here all the time.” Throughout the conversation she had seemed to be looking for something, walking around the marsh purposefully.

She smiled triumphantly. “And there are also – ah! What are the most murderous creatures?”

“That’s easy,” Ron answered, stretched out on the ground. “Humans.”

Hermione smiled. “Not quite. I read in my grandfather’s books of great plagues in the old world. They were caused by small insects that made a distinctive humming noise.” 

“Like jabberjays?” Harry asked uncertainly. Hermione nodded. “So this is -”

“Some kind of fucked up safari,” Ron cut in darkly. Harry jumped at the swearword but smiled anyway. “We’re dressed for it, aren’t we? They certainly have a sense of irony.”

“Actually, it’s not ironic at all,” Hermione said, slipping into her know-it-all voice. Harry and Ron glanced at each other but didn’t really mind it by now, knew she barely even noticed she was doing it. She didn’t mean to put them down and probably had justifiable cause to consider herself superior in any case.

“Irony is the difference between what you expect and what actually exists. It _is_ a safari so you would expect us to have safari clothes, it’s not ironic.”

While speaking, Hermione had been bravely poking her hand into the mass of buzzing insects near the swamp water; Harry privately thought he wouldn’t have put his hand anywhere near there. Hermione allowed one of the tiny buzzing insects to delicately sit on her skin and draw a pinprick of blood before she drew back and joined Ron and Harry at the dying fire.

She looked up and saw Harry and Ron staring at her. “What?” she said, undaunted. “I want to see what happens!" 

“You’re crazy,” Ron said. Harry wouldn’t have put it quite like that. Ron continued. “Plagues, Hermione, plagues! You just told us about them.”

Hermione shrugged and said coolly, “Well, we won’t know for sure unless we let one of them bite us. Anyway, maybe the source was translated wrongly. If these could cause plagues I don’t see how any humans could have survived.”

She sucked the wound until it stopped bleeding and said “Let’s set up camp.”

In the morning, Hermione was still alive. The small red spot had become a lump but Hermione said it didn’t itch so they forgot about it. They spent the next few days as peacefully as they could. They took turns choosing what to eat from their meagre supplies and what direction to wander in before returning to the Cornucopia well before sunset.

Ron made them laugh and Hermione kept them safe. Harry wasn’t sure exactly what he did, but when Ron stopped with a pained grunt, his muscles tight, as Hermione strode unceasingly on, Harry sat with him until he could bear to continue. When Hermione missed her parents, Harry traded stories with her in the dead of night, feeling the sadness in his own chest lightening with each one. 

It was almost a week after when Hermione suddenly became deathly ill. The water troubles they had expended so much energy on ended abruptly after they got a joint package from all of their districts containing a small packet of pills. Harry’s note was signed from the baker. 

_You’re doing great, Harry. You keep looking after your friends and I’ll look after your parents. – T. Mellark_

The words settled something inside Harry; his parents were fine. He could die happily, knowing that.

Ron was less happy with the package. He had been grumpy recently and was in full on sarcasm mode, despite Hermione’s attempt to placate him with his little sister’s note.

“Oh, great! Thank god they didn’t send us any water, I rather feel we’ve got too much of that, don’t you? We’re about to die of thirst but thank god we have these pills, they’re just what I wanted, do you know, I thought to myself just this morning that I couldn’t possibly live another day without a packet of _damn pills_.”

Normally Hermione could easily stay calm in the face of Ron’s obstinacy, but she said in a sharp tone, recalling the day they had met, “Oh for god’s sake, Ronald, are you as stupid as you sound? They’re not just pills, they’re iodine, they’ll make the water safe to drink. We don’t have to lug water around, and we can get it from the waterholes at any time during the day.” 

While speaking Hermione had broken the packet into three equal pieces and handed one each to Ron and Harry. “Just in case,” she said grimly and they both nodded. Ron was chastened but didn’t recover the easygoingness that Harry had previously so admired. 

It didn’t help Ron’s mood that they had genuine reason to be wary. They were all becoming more and more uneasy about where the Careers were and why the game makers were not forcing them together. There was only the Careers (minus one – not Malfoy, unfortunately, Ron grumbled), the three of them, the male tribute from Eight and the female tribute from Three. Soon, there would be a final reckoning. 

Hermione’s illness seemed to calm Ron, much to Harry’s surprise. He became focused and serious and spent all his time with Hermione, leaving Harry to forage and make the nightly water run and keep watch.

Hermione’s skin paled and became searing to touch, sweat dropped off her unceasingly, and her arms and legs hurt so much she couldn’t move. She curled into a ball. Ron and Harry were terrified. They looked after her the best they could, sponging her with their shirts and making her drink water. They spent a sleepless night watching her toss and turn.

Hermione woke up the next morning feeling fine. She was bemused to learn they had thought she was dying and could barely remember the previous day. She connected it to the insects immediately; both Ron and Harry had completely forgotten about them in their terror. 

She was cheerful as Harry berated her for her recklessness. “I just wanted to know! And I’m fine. So we now know – avoid them if you can, but if we absolutely have to wade through the swamp we can because they’re not fatal. We got information, Harry, it was worth it. I know you have your self-sacrifying thing but you can’t take all the risks, you know.”

She said it flippantly, not knowing how much it hurt Harry to hear her accurate assessment. 

Harry was quite put out because despite what Hermione had said he had not actually taken any risks so far; Ron and Hermione were the ones running away with water from the animals and deliberately infecting themselves with their venom.

The Careers finally came upon the trio three days later. Their water tablets were working wonderfully; Ron had not gone back to his sullen state after Hermione’s recovery. It was sunset so they were hiding from the animals in the marsh. The buzzing insects were interrupting their sleep. They were hiding only half-heartedly because they were still fit and strong, stronger than they had ever been from their regular water drinking, and knew they could not starve off the fight indefinitely. 

They all wanted it over as soon as possible although they had not once spoken after what would come after. Harry knew Ron would want to save Hermione, and Harry could easily be convinced by that, knowing despite his desire that he couldn’t save both Ron and Hermione, but he also knew Hermione would want any decision to be a fair one where they all would have an equal chance of surviving. 

Ron was on watch and the others woke up to his frantic shouting. Hermione shot an arrow before Harry even had the chance to pick up his sword, and he flattened himself to the ground as a returning knife came close to him.

Hermione and Pansy were duelling in a blur of feet, while Goyle had Ron in a vicious looking headlock. Malfoy stood back, an amused look on his smug face. Waiting for Harry.

Harry didn’t know what he had to be so smug about. They were evenly matched: Pansy fought dirty, but Hermione was faster, able to get an elbow to the face of Goyle, surprising him, leaving Ron to wriggle free. Harry was about to sneak around and see if he could attack Draco without him noticing when he noticed a whisper in the trees.

“Guys -” he began to shout, but stopped when it became unnecessary as out of the trees around them the other Careers came. 

Outnumbered, Harry looked for options to retreat and found none. Hermione shouted at them to come closer, fumbling on the ground for something. She opened the large package she had gone into the Cornucopia the first day to get, the package neither Ron nor Harry could convince her to give up. She had lugged it determinedly everywhere they went, never complaining like Ron often did about the tiring walk.

She hurriedly unzipped it and pressed a button: metal shot out and knit itself, almost magically, into a large piece of fabric stretched between opposing poles. 

Hermione grabbed its underside and shouted at the two to grab on too. They did, bewildered, Ron taking a nasty gash to his leg as he struggled to get free, and as soon as they touched the cool metal, Hermione jumped. They immediately lifted up into the sky and began to fly. They seemed to defy gravity, swept up by air currents Hermione expertly found until all she had to do was steer. She manoeuvred them up and away.

“Wow,” was all Harry could say.

Despite his fear and roiling stomach he had to admit that the sun dappled grey lake below him and the vast expanse of sand stretching to the horizon was beautiful. The evening sky was reddening. Far below, sand rippled in the breeze. The waving figures of Malfoy and the other careers were unthreatening, almost comical.

Ron was short. “What – the - fuck, Hermione?” 

“Hang-gliding!” she cried jubilantly.

Ron and Harry exchanged a glance. 

“My dad did it when I was younger! Before I was born! He stopped then, you can’t hang-glide with a family!” Hermione shouted over the whistling wind. 

Ron made a face like this answer was totally inadequate; Harry privately agreed, although he was grateful too and told Hermione so, laughing despite himself.

Harry felt, in that moment, like he could die and not even care. He felt like a child but also eternal somehow. He could never have hoped to _fly_ back home in the district, to feel like he was actually free for once. 

“Can we keep on going? Just get out of here?” Ron yelled over the wind. Harry hoped it would mask his words so the Gamekeepers couldn’t hear. He wondered if there even were cameras up there. 

“I don’t know, but I highly doubt so. There’ll be some kind of way of stopping us.”

Hermione grunted as she battled the flapping sheets. The hang glider didn’t seem particularly sturdy. 

“We should try! We’re going to die anyway. And the hovercrafts can leave the arena, can’t they! Why not us!” Ron said, braver than Harry would ever be.

Harry didn’t know how to feel about escaping. It was foolish beyond measure. Even if there weren’t any obstacles to them leaving, they had no idea where they were in Panem, or beyond, even, if there was a beyond, which Harry didn’t know if there was. 

It was almost certainly the middle of nowhere. They could be tracked with the small chip inserted into their arms, and there was every likelihood the place they landed would have no food or water too. They would be hunted. It would be just like the games without the sliver of protection being filmed gave them. They would never survive their freedom.

But he was going to die and never see his parents again anyway and there was something so tempting about staying in the sky, where it was so easy to believe no-one could get them, flying away, free if only for a moment. 

Just then, a large shape swooped above them; Harry jolted as it smacked into the canopy above him. He realised with a start they had collided with a bird. Beside him Ron looked sick, green-faced, eyes tightly closed, white knuckles against the shining metal. Hermione looked scared. She screamed as the bird swooped into the top of them again.

Harry realised with a start the bird was doing it on purpose.

Hermione yelled, “It thinks we’re an eagle too! We’re threatening it!” She fiddled around, manoeuvring them at an angle. “I think we better land now.”

“Couldn’t agree more. You alright, Ron?” Harry said.

“Oh, fine.” Ron replied, eyes still closed. “I’m in the air, hanging onto a metal contraption with an eagle pecking at us. I’m more than fine, I’m _great_.” 

Harry managed to stay silent, but Hermione giggled and he broke into a smile.

They landed, and spent the evening laughing together about their dramatic escape. It struck Harry, back on the ground, that they never would have been able to fly outside of the arena. They had forgotten the hang-glider was provided for them at the Cornocupia. He supposed Ron and Hermione had come to the same sudden realisation but it remained unspoken.

 

 

_I remember you said don’t leave me here alone_

 

They had escaped once but Hermione, after inspecting the punctured hang-glider, proclaimed it broken and they had left its corpse to rust. They all knew there would not be another miraculous and daring escape. The Careers would be more prepared and more brutal.

Malfoy had just stood there, waiting for Harry, probably wanting to gloat over his death. He wouldn’t do that again.

Hermione was pensive about the Careers. “I don’t think they can stay together much longer. It’s only us and Three and Eight to find, right? Well, we could die at any moment. Especially after our escape, they’ll be fighting and there’s barely anything to hold them together any longer. Not much benefit to it. They almost had us. If I hadn’t had the hang-glider...” She trailed off.

“And they know we don’t have it anymore. They don’t need five of them to kill us.”

The day after, Hermione became sick again, as ill and as quickly as she had before. The symptoms were the same but so was the recovery. They sat quietly the morning after, more sober than they had been after her last recovery.

Harry tried to break the silence. “I wonder – do you think this’ll happen again?” 

“I don’t know.” Hermione said flatly. 

“Because it’s every three days and –”

“I know, Harry.” 

They lapsed back into silence. They would never find out.

Ron had sunk back into his moody state. He and Hermione argued incessantly about everything from where to pitch camp to who would be on guard. Harry found it exhausting but stayed scrupulously silent.

Hermione said, in an annoyed and annoyingly pretentious tone, “Draco isn’t the real enemy, the Careers are.”

So apparently they were having that argument again. Where Ron blamed Draco for all of the problems in the world and Hermione totally exonerated him of any personal responsibility even thought he had knifed Colin after offering him sanctuary and left him to bleed out for thirty minutes before he had finally died.

Honestly, Harry thought they were both wrong but he also didn’t see the point in the argument. They were so close to death, and so close to survival and winning. On the very edge of the subtle knife and turning against each other would overbalance it, he was sure. 

Ron scoffed. “The real enemy? The _real enemy_? Hermione, this is the Hunger Games. They’re _all trying to kill us_.”

Harry listened to them bicker, eyes glazing over. He was exhausted and hot. He couldn’t imagine arguing with what he now considered to be his best friends and couldn’t bear listening to it. 

He looked up, waiting for an appropriate interlude to interject and try to change the subject or at least attract their ire to him instead of each other. They would easily scream at him too, but at least they were always sorry afterwards.

He was shocked to see Hermione’s eyes glimmering with tears. He thought it an amicable disagreement that would blow over shortly, like all their arguments had before then. 

“Well, maybe I should just leave! Leave you two to it! If you think you’ll do so much better without me! Never mind that it was me who can outrun the animals, it was me who told you your stupid pit plan was stupid and then it almost got us all _killed,”_ Ron said.

Harry knew Ron was being unfair, that they had all contributed, had all saved each other, that they worked well together. He wanted to point this out, but couldn’t make his mouth work, feeling ashamed that he didn’t wanting Ron to turn on him like he had turned on Hermione.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ronald,” Hermione said. “All I am _saying_ , if you will _listen_ , is it won’t _work_ – ”

“Well, if my ideas are so stupid then maybe I should just leave!”

“ _Harry_ would never leave,” Hemrione said cruelly.

There was a silence.

Ron was shaking his head slowly, looking incredulous. He scoffed once, and turned around and began walking away so quickly Harry had barely leapt to his feet before he was out of earshot. 

He and Hermione scrambled after Ron, who stopped and turned to stare at them. It felt like a confrontation, Harry realised with a start, the three of them on opposing sides, with all that space between them. And still, Harry didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t leave, Ron,” Hermione eventually said. “Don’t leave us here.”

At her pleading, Ron closed his eyes. When they opened, Harry knew they had lost him. Ron resumed walking, quicker than before, half-running away.

Hermione ran after him. “You’ll die by yourself, Ron!” She shouted desperately.

Ron turned back once more and shook his head. “I don’t care,” he hissed and stalked into the setting sun, in the direction of the Careers’ camp so he knew Hermione wouldn’t follow him.

Hermione knew this too. She turned and walked back to Harry. Biting her lower lip to stop herself from crying. 

They set up camp in silence. Harry didn’t think Hermione would sleep and knew he should take the opportunity to get some rest but he couldn’t bear to leave her alone in the dark night. 

He had an irrational fear he would fall asleep and she would leave him too, and he would wake up alone for the first time in his life. He slid his hand into Hermione’s, like Ron often did, but she pulled away almost gently. 

Feeling alone, feeling useless, feeling tired and homesick, missing his parents so much he wanted to die, he fell into a restless sleep. Hermione let him sleep long past dawn. When he woke up, he asked her uncertainly if she minded moving camp for safety, even knowing Ron might come back and if they moved he would likely never find them again even if he wanted to, and she replied that she didn’t care.

Hermione had mentioned it once. “It would be better,” she said. Their audience would prefer it. They might get more sponsors if they pretended Hermione was falling in love with one of them. Harry looked over at Ron but upon seeing Ron’s expression he looked away. 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Hermione,” he said quietly.

“Oh. Okay.” She said, sounding disappointed for some reason, as if she really wanted to pretend to be in love with one of her friends in front of everyone she knew and many more beyond to get sponsors so she didn’t die of hunger.

Harry and Hermione wandered about listlessly for a few days, although it felt to Harry like much longer. They spoke little and took almost no precautions against being spotted. Harry sensed Hermione didn’t care if she was killed, just like him.

This woke him from his sense of stupor and apathy. He had to save Hermione. He failed his parents and Ron but he had one last chance. He started taking their usual safety measures, training with his sword and Hermione’s bow and arrow too because she refused to do so. 

They drifted across the arena. The boy from Eight showed up in the sky. They didn’t speak of Ron. At some point, they reached the arena’s edge and stared at the towering cliffs. They made Harry feel small and young, insignificant.

Hermione started to draw on them, crushing some berries she had picked up somewhere along the way and saved. She willingly told Harry about her childhood, and the tension between them lessoned somewhat as the story was held between them, extended on a gossamer thin thread, an entreaty, an apology, a sacred confession, tender and true, fragile like the first flowers of spring sprouting from the hard ground.

The next day, they received a package from Ron’s district. Hermione laughed cruelly. “Don’t they know?” she said caustically and refused to open it.

Harry opened it silently and carefully.

It was light, just a slip of paper.

_Don’t go. Ginny Weasley._

“What does it mean?” Harry asked, although he thought he knew.

“It means they’ve got him,” Hermione said flatly.

“Should we – we should.” Harry couldn’t speak.

Hermione’s eyes glistened with tears. She looked sharp and fierce, back to her normal self.

“I want to, Harry, I do. I don’t care that he left, I want to go for him.”

The tears spilled over.

“But we can’t! They’ll just kill us all. And he – he won’t want that. I know that. Even though he left, even if – if he hates us, he won’t want us to die for him.” 

They talked little for the rest of the day. Nothing happened; the arena was as silent as ever. In the night, they lay side by side and Harry said what he already knew they both knew. 

“I have to go, Hermione.”

“I know.”

She convinced him to wait until they had more information. The Weasleys had the benefit of cameras to see where Ron was – although, Harry supposed, they also had the burden of watching him suffer while Harry could only imagine. Hermione was sure the Careers wouldn’t kill him without action from them because the Careers need to draw them out.

Thankfully, Harry didn’t have long to wait. The invitation was broadcasted later that day. The head keeper’s voice boomed out:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls – and Harry wonders who the ladies and gentlemen are – Each Of The Remaining Groups Has Something That Belongs To You. Nine and Four, The Careers Have Your Heart’s Greatest Desire – Harry thinks, with disdain, they are so dramatic – Careers, Little Miss Three Has Your Weapon. And Nine and Four Has What Three Needs.”

“What do we have that she could want?” Harry asked blankly. 

Hermione sighed. “Water. And she can have it. I’m not dying over it when it’ll all be over soon anyway. We have to go after the Careers, we might as well do it on our terms because the gamekeepers will sure as hell push us together and it’ll be worse if we hide, you know they hate cowards, although god knows they need to get a better definition. She’ll probably be dead before we find them, but if we see her I’ll throw her my tablets. She’ll figure it out.” 

Harry felt uncomfortable but had to say it, keenly missing Ron’s presence. Ron had always said the things that were necessary even if they were unpleasant to say.

“Shouldn’t we, you know, maybe try and kill her when she comes? This is it, this is the end. This is the Hunger Games. Or – the Thirsty Games. And we’re giving her water.” 

“I’m not a killer, Harry,” Hermione said, looking at him. “Not when I don’t have to be. And no-one will convince me I have to kill her. Are you?” 

It was so easy for Harry to say no. He was thankful that there was somebody in the arena who understood him, when he had been searching for that his whole life.

“Is this the brutality in our kindness?” Harry asked. “Planning to give her the iodine tablets, knowing she probably won’t live to use them.” 

“Well, maybe she will. Maybe we’ll kill the Careers and they’ll kill us in our fight. Maybe that’s what we should be hoping for. We needed a pack to survive. She did it all by herself,” Hermione said, like she didn’t much care if she died. 

They got to the Cornucopia and saw the Careers there, waiting for them. Ron was tied to a post, head slumped, bloody all over. 

Harry and Hermione walked towards them together.

When they got there Malfoy was unexpectedly trying to stop another Career from slashing Ron with his silver dagger.

“Just kill him. There’s no need for this kind of torture,” Draco said distastefully.

“I forgot the _merchants_ don’t know what it’s like to get their hands dirty,” Veruca, from Draco’s district, laughed.

Just then, the Career on watch whistled and Harry knew they had been spotted. He lifted his sword and prepared to charge with Hermione covering him, but then there was a large explosion and he fell onto the sand. He didn’t black out but it took a moment to regain his bearings and be able to stand.

When he looked back at the Careers, he saw only red specks bleeding into the sand.

Only Ron, the Career torturing him, and Draco next to them had been outside the impact zone.

Hermione let an arrow fly and pierce the Career’s neck. He fell to the floor, dead. 

Draco ran. 

Hermione ran to Ron and undid his bindings and ran her hands over his injuries.

Ron mumbled. “What did you do?”

Harry and Hermione looked at each other, both lost. They had no idea what had happened.

Hermione gasped “Three!”

Harry realised, in all the uncertainty and confusion, they had all forgotten Three had something the Careers wanted. A weapon. A bomb, apparently.

But where was she?

Hermione let go of Ron and raised her bow but she was too late. 

Harry suddenly had a knife against his throat. Three had hurled into the Cornucopia like a tiny spitfire, a hurried hurricane. 

He took a deep breath and walked forwards, cutting the knife into his neck deeply. Blood spurted out, taking her by surprise. She jolted backwards. Harry was wounded but not grievously so. He took advantage of her surprise, breaking away and helping Hermione to carry Ron.

There was no hang-glider that time: they ran for their lives, kicking up sand in their wake. Three against one and no element of surprise and no range weapon. Three disappeared into the badlands. 

“You didn’t have to do that,” Hermione admonished, carefully pressing against Harry’s wound. “I had a plan.”

Ron snorted. “Could have fooled me!”

It was light-hearted and not malicious but Hermione turned to look at him sharply. In all the fuss, they had all forgotten that Ron had left. 

That Hermione had begged him to stay, and he had left.

 

 

_Just close your eyes_

 

Things were getting dire. There was no food in the Arena. Hermione decided they finally had to use the animals as food sources, but hunting them was completely out of the question. They were too weak and the animals, despite their lack of Capitol enhancement, were too strong. Hermione shot an arrow into the heart of a deer but she hadn’t managed to properly isolate it and the other deer stayed clustered around its dead body until they all disappeared five minutes later. Hermione decided the dead bodies would only stay if they were by themselves and killed by the tributes.

Ron apologised to Harry, a little awkwardly, and Harry accepted. Ron and Hermione had their own conversation that Harry wasn’t privy to.

They managed to circumvent the disappearing pits by placing them outside the route they trod, and getting their attention to go their way. They were all very excited the first time it worked. A lion had fallen into one of their pits with a surprised snarl, and they spent a boisterous four minutes discussing and imagining in great detail exactly how they were going to roast and eat it; unfortunately, lions were pack animals too and its pack successfully rescued the lion after a labourious effort a few seconds before they disappeared.

“It’s cute,” Hermione sighed, watching. Harry privately agreed.

Ron, however, glowered at the dramatic rescue. “I’m starving,” he moaned. He had been much better since they had survived the Careers but was still prone to fits of glumness.

He wouldn’t be Ron without that, and Harry was happy he felt safe to still act like that around them. Ron’s districts had far less famines than Harry’s and less even than Hermione’s. He wasn’t used to hunger.

“I suppose that’s why we always lose,” he said. “My brothers, Fred and George, they’re always moaning about how we don’t have any Victors worth the title.”

A zebra also fell into a pit, but again other animals stood by, and when they got to it after darkness, they discovered that obviously, it had disappeared just like its kin. They were debating what to do when it appeared in the pit the next sunset when the package arrived. Harry left Hermione and Ron discussing the issue to investigate. 

He wondered if it was another invitation. There was only Draco and Three left. They’ve decided now is the time to become killers. In a fight, they won’t hold back.

Three against two. They had to hope it was enough. They had to hope in the fight, two of them die too. It was likely. Now was the time to hope one of them might survive.

Harry didn’t know what was going to happen.

The package turned out to be for Hermione from her district. It was three sachets of food, two blue and one red.

There was a note attached. It says “Pour this into their soup.”

Harry saw the note attached and decided not to read it for it was not his to read. He hurriedly made up the soup, because they were all so hungry, pouring all three mixes into the same pot of boiling water and mixing them together.

He divided it into two bowls. He poured plain water into his bowl.

Ron was so famished he could barely stand; Harry and Hermione were not much better. And Harry’s neck festered while Hermione had a reliable spell every three days that left her unable to move. 

They didn’t need Hermione to tell them to eat slowly this time. Their stomachs were bloated and distended, and hurt when pressed. They couldn’t stomach more than a few mouthfuls at a time, even if they had wanted to. Hermione fed Ron carefully before she took a mouthful, sitting him up so he didn’t choke. Her arms were so weak she could barely hold the morsels up to his mouth long enough for him to open his mouth. 

They didn’t know where their next food would come from, or if they would get any. Harry slurped his soup – really boiling water - so as not to make Hermione suspicious. He would rather die than watch his friends wither away, but he didn’t have the energy to argue the point. He didn’t want to make Ron or Hermione expend energy trying to convince him to eat, either. So he never told them of his sacrifice and Ron died unknowing.

 

 

_The sun is going down_

 

It comforted Harry a lot, that time would always go on, no matter what. It felt like the time in the arena is endless, but it wasn’t. Time marched on and nothing could stop it. Despite how Harry felt, he could never go back. He didn’t even have the choice. He was grateful, truly. That certainty was the only thing that enabled him to go to sleep.

When he woke up, he knew something was terribly wrong. He woke to dying embers and a weak sun straining through the cloud. There was utter silence, not even the wind whistling. 

Harry looked through the lifting darkness to Ron and Hermione. They were still there, in the same positions they fell asleep in. They were still. Hermione’s hair had fallen across her face overnight; Harry jostled her first because he could not bear to see what state Ron was in.

He could not stand the thought that he was lying next to a corpse, it utterly paralysed him. He wanted to know if Ron was alright but the urge to remain ignorant was stronger. 

He didn’t mean to go to sleep, because even though he was starving someone needed to stay up with Ron. Hermione had said she would take first watch and wake up Harry in four hours, but she never did.

Harry shook Hermione’s shoulder gently. She groaned and shook her head. As she sat up, Harry with a start saw blood trickling slowly from her nose. She looked dazed and groggy. 

“Harry, what’s going on? Is it my turn to keep watch?”

Harry spoke carefully. “No, it’s morning. Are you okay?”

He knew she wasn’t but he hoped she would lie to him.

“How’s Ron?” she said instead of responding. Harry had not checked Ron was even alive: he felt chilled all of a sudden. He hoped desperately, as desperately as he had ever wished anything, that he was alive. 

Hermione did not have the motor control to be gentle. She slapped a hand clumsily against Ron’s face.

“He’s breathing,” she reported quietly. Harry found the strength to roll Ron over. He had felt a surge of relief at Hermione’s words, but it died away as he took Ron in. He had survived the night and was indeed breathing but it was clear he was dying. His face was as pale as the dead, his lips blue.

Harry couldn’t understand Hermione’s sudden deterioration but Hermione understood immediately what happened. Sharp, even in her dying throes.

“It’s the soup,” she said. 

Harry made an agreeing noise, because what else could hit both of them so quickly and him not at all.

Hermione smiled kindly at him. “I suppose you had less? You gave Ron some? Oh, Harry.”

He did not know whether her words were condemnation or sympathy. 

He hadn't even drunk a drop.

He wondered, if he hadn’t – so innocently – intercepted the package, what Hermione would have done with the poison her district sent to kill him and Ron. 

If she would have been kind, or brutal. What being each one would have meant anyway. 

Harry could imagine the mourning in Hermione’s district at the loss of their brightest and best, their young daughter, and he wanted to cry for them instead of himself, despite everything.

 

 

_No-one can hurt you now_

 

Ron’s corpse lay by them, stark and unforgiving. Ron had so much poison it killed him quickly; it caused Hermione’s progressive paralysis. Hermione was bleeding out through a large sore that had opened up, and dying, as Harry crouched by her, pressing into her stomach and holding onto her hand just as tightly as he was pressing into her stomach’s gaping wound.

“Don’t cry, Harry! I need all my strength to die at twelve,” Hermione said as she chuckled quietly to herself and Harry’s tears dropped steadily onto her.

Harry cried harder at her words but did try to stop. Hermione was still smiling. Harry was still trying to ignore Ron’s body.

Harry didn’t want Hermione to know somebody in her home tried to kill him and Ron. 

“I thought this was a natural arena. But this surely be something artificial the Game maker’s concocted,” he said, hoping to distract her.

“Hemlock,” Hermione whispered. “Grows in nature in my District. Poison. Causes paralysis... and then death. I’m still right.”

Harry laughed through the tears. “You are. You are.”

A second later a thought came and he was shaking her, too hard, more terrified than he had ever been before in his life.

“Is there an antidote? Hermione! Is there a cure?”

If there was one, she would know about it.

Hermione’s eyes fluttered close. “No,” she breathed.

“Remember the wall that you wrote on, when Ron was gone? What do you think the words mean? You must have some idea,” Harry said desperately, trying to keep her conscious and alive. It suddenly seemed very important that Hermione didn’t leave the earth without understanding what the words meant.

But Hermione said, eyes shining with tears, “I suppose my grandfather knew words weren’t all that mattered. Books, and cleverness. Oh, Harry, it means nothing.”

All the smiles and good cheer at dying was gone then. Everything was gone. 

And then she coughed, more delirious than ever, and said, “I killed him.”

She meant that she fed Ron the soup that killed him; she poured it down his throat when he was too weak to resist. It would have been a terrible burden to live with, but she wouldn’t have to. 

Harry knew it wasn’t her fault. It was his.

He poured the poison into his unsuspecting friends’ bowls, twice the strength it should have been. He didn’t think to question Hermione’s District’s motives or be suspicious. He couldn’t imagine the cruelty of the world and his best friends paid for it.

He held her hand as she died, unable to confess what he did because it would be too much of a plea for absolution and Harry was selfish enough to kill his two best friends, but not selfish enough to make their deaths about him while they were living them. 

The claws came down as the heavens opened; the rain hit Harry like retribution. He stared into the darkening sky, even when the rain obscured his vision and he couldn’t see anything; even when so much time had passed he was sure the plane had taken Hermione away. Even when the rain stopped, and the clouds parted, and the sun appeared briefly in the sky only to set. Even then, when he was staring into a sky too dark and vast to comprehend, knowing it held all he has lost, he fell asleep staring at the stars, and at one star in particular, the brightest in the sky. 

Understanding, for the first time, how kindness and brutality can so easily co-exist.

~

“I think there’s a lot of brutality in kindness,” Hermione said earnestly on the TV screen during her memorial programme, still alive on the screen, immortalised eternally, and Lily sobbed. She wanted to meet this brilliant girl and thank her in person for all she had done for her son but she would never be able to. 

The quote was perfect for the Capitol, for all Lily knew Hermione had not meant it that way. The Capitol believed there is kindness in their brutality. 

But there never is.

 

 

_Come morning light_

The next day, Draco killed Three. Harry saw her face in the sky and realised he was only one tribute away from going home.

Only one tribute. Only killing one boy to go home. 

That wasn’t only.

 

 

_You and I’ll be safe and sound_

 

Harry met Draco again, the last sorry chapter of their story. They were both sheltering in the same cave from the football sized rain droplets.

Draco still held onto his knife but loosely. He looked terrified, chalk-faced, as he stared at Harry from his position on the floor. The fight with Three must have been long and bloody.

Draco’s intestines spilled out of his body and his blood glistened on the sand, soaking in as fast as it spilled out of his body.

Harry was just tired. He wouldn’t have to kill Draco after all. He would die all by himself. He could go home only having killed his friends. As if that was only. So he lied. 

“It’s okay, Draco, it’s okay. We’ll be okay.”

Wavering hands, and fluttering eyes, and slippery knives. Facing kindness for the first time, and feeling it hit you like the fire of a thousand swords.

Draco dropped the knife. 

Harry sat on the ground heavily, sword sheathed, wondering why he was suddenly so weak, because Draco hadn’t touched him

It was starvation and exhaustion. He was dying, too.

 

 

_Darling, everything’s on fire_

 

In the control room there was panic. The Emperor was playing around with the buttons idly. It was his very first Hunger Games. He wanted it to be one to remember. Some of it had gone okay, there were a few good deaths, but what was this end? 

A barely lit cave, two mud soaked boys, the boy who should be the winner choosing to let his opponent die slow instead of delivering the final blow.

“They’re both going to die soon, sire. When one dies we may not be able to get into the caves fast enough to save the other one. What should we do?”

Lucian Malfoy was in prison but he still had supporters. The man was foolish, but so were many others in the Capitol. The emperor supposed it was a good time to show his naysayers he could make prudent, sensible decisions for the good of the kingdom, to show he could be inclusive and rational, although he loathed any idea of mercy. 

Upset, like a child would be that they have to do the right thing when their parents make them, he lashed out childishly.

“Cut off the legs of the black haired one.”

The Gamekeepers, terrified, obliged.

An interesting idea: that there is kindness in brutality. Perhaps that little girl was right.

 

 

_And nobody comes to save you now_

 

Harry isn’t sure what just happened. One moment he was sitting on the floor as his heart slowed and his hair dripped, watching Draco take painful gasps and wondering whether to ask him whether he wanted Harry to slit his neck quickly.

What if he said no?

What if he said yes?

Harry felt it was a silent standoff. Draco had no weapon and Harry had his sword and all his morals. He dared to believe he could win and go home to his parents. He hadn’t wanted to and hadn’t intended to but Hermione and Ron were gone; he couldn’t save them now. He didn’t know if he was worth saving but his parents surely didn’t deserve to have to bury their only child.

Hermione hadn’t won. Ron hadn’t either. Harry did, almost. 

Before he could ask, he felt a blinding pain.

He could hear screaming. He tried to get up to help the person who was screaming but he couldn’t. He looked down and immediately averted his eyes. 

His- his legs were gone. 

Ron was gone. Hermione was gone. Everything was gone.

Harry begged for Draco to kill him, and Draco did.

He raised Harry’s sword, and brought it down into Harry’s chest – mercifully, kindly, brutally.

Harry’s last thought was, _I want to go home_. He didn’t but he had been brought up to go to church every week and Dudley had always complained but Harry liked the stain glass windows with the light pouring in and the feel of the wooden seat under him and closing his eyes and joining in with his neighbours to pray for everyone else. So he did go home.

It was a Sunday and at home everyone was using their bit of freedom to watch the last fight and pray for him. Almost everyone.

Some were using their freedom to plot against the Capitol. Harry would tell them not to, if he knew. There was no point. Nothing would be accomplished. The emperor would die, but so what?

There would always be somebody to replace him. Maybe less cruel, maybe more. And if they were less personally cruel that just meant they would be more efficient at ruling and oppression. Harry would say that. If he wasn’t dead. 

Malfoy won, becoming the youngest Victor ever, and nobody expected any different. His mother was so proud of him, and his father actually looked at him like he noticed him, and it was enough to wipe the blood out of his mind, just. 

His only real kill was Three and on the screen as they replay it, he slashed at her desperately and she screamed. Aunt Bellatrix called her a bitch because she managed to injure Draco so grievously and Draco flinched because she wasn’t. She was a worthy opponent and she made it to the final three and she didn’t deserve to be humiliated and degraded in death. 

Bellatrix would never accept that. Before he went she had told him to show them what we thought of the outer districts. She was almost fanatical in her District pride, in her patriotism.

Draco went to Harry’s District on his Victory tour and made a perfunctory speech, moving his gaze every now and then as his mentor had told him to what he assumed were Harry’s parents and brother although only the brother looked upset at all. He didn’t know how to feel about Harry. He hadn’t killed Draco, although that was only because he was clearly already dying, and Draco felt it might have even been more merciful to have killed him. 

It was in the girl’s District that it was hardest. She had almost won and she deserved to win. Draco had the Careers and Harry had Hermione but she survived all alone until almost the very end with no help but herself. Out of all of it, he felt he was only really responsible for her death. He hadn’t even thought twice when he drove the knife in.

Her parents stared at him with blank impressions, but unlike like with Harry’s parents, he could tell their impassive look was masking their true feelings, their rage and sorrow.

He stumbled through the speech his mentor had written for him. It seemed embarrassing, a pathetic plaster over their gaping wound. 

“Taylor was a true opponent, the kind of opponent you wish for because they challenge you, but also dread. I respected her. She made it into a Game, not just survival. She made it entertaining for you watching, and she made me realise it wasn’t my birth right to win. My name didn’t matter in the Arena. Who has ever heard of a Swift? But a Swift almost won.”

That was the end of the neat printing on his cue card. It didn’t feel like enough.

“And… I’m sorry she’s not here today. I would have liked to talk to her, outside the Arena, about our fight. She would have a lot to say to me, I think, and a lot to give.”

Malfoy thought he had said enough and too much. He hoped his aunt was listening. He didn’t regret winning, but he wished the girl could have won too. And Harry too, because in the end he wasn’t that bad, after all. 

Not instead of him but just... alongside him.

That would be impossible, of course.

There was only ever one winner of the Hunger Games.

 

 

_Keep your aim locked_

 

Lily Evans screamed as she watched her son die.

Vernon called the secret police. He had stood this for too long. His wife’s sister was a traitor and more importantly a disgrace to the family and he wouldn’t stand for it any longer.

They dragged Lily away and shot James as he tried to resist. There was talk of turning Lily into an Avox but the Emperor was in no mood to be merciful twice in one day. Because she was arrested as a Capitol guest, she received a trial under the archaic and rarely invoked laws of the land that must be adhered to despite their political inconvenience, the Emperor’s lawyers told him. 

Her trial was held underground and was nothing more than an excuse for two of the Capitol’s best lawyers to pontificate back and forwards. The night Lily was executed, they sat at the court bar, drinking and laughing together. For Vernon’s service, he received a month’s wages. 

Petunia was unhappy for a while, women were so _feebleminded_ , but he bought her a new dress with part of the money and she forgot it soon enough. His nephew had good for nothing parents, and look what it got him. The Capitol worked you hard but they knew the importance of discipline and order. After that nobody in the district even thought of resisting.

How could they? Why would they? The Capitol would kill everyone.

Their heads down, they remembered Harry privately and quietly. The little boy who carried their shopping home one day. Who gave them bread. Who gave them such hope in his brief life and such devastation through his death.

 

 

_Even when the music’s gone._

 

Hermione woke up. She had never believed in heaven and had scoffed at it even, rude and dismissive as she so rarely was. She didn’t intend to start believing in Heaven now, although it was hard to come up with an alternate logical explanation of why she was waking up when the last thing she remembered is closing her eyes in the quiet certainty of death.

The way Harry’s eyes looked before she closed hers made her certain there was no other explanation for his agony but her death. And there was only ever one winner of the Hunger Games.

She pinched herself. Her skin, too clean and too pale, reddened slightly and stung. 

A man she didn’t recognise walked into the room and sat by her bed, studying her.

He said sternly, but in a manner reminiscent of a schoolteacher and not a captor, “Now, you aren’t going to give me any trouble, are you? No childish tantrums or tears. You’re too old for that, aren’t you, Hermione?”

Hermione had sought the validation of every teacher she had ever had. This man was no different.

“Yes, um- sir?”

He smiled kindly. “You can call me Professor.”

“Professor – what am I doing here?” Hermione didn’t mention her confusion at being alive, because she knew better than to admit to a lack of knowledge in an unfamiliar environment.

He was blunt and readily answered her question.

“We saved you from the arena. We have the authority to do that here, you understand. We don’t, mostly. Most reaped children are just as uninspired as the ones they leave behind in their District. Every so often we get a brilliant one in the arena, and we save them if we can. The Capitol recognises true brilliance, you know. It saw it in you.”                                                 

He paused and Hermione didn’t know how to feel. Flattered, of course. She always enjoyed people in authority telling her she was brilliant. But she also felt confused, shocked and unsure. No-one in the Districts had any idea a tribute could be saved like that. There was so much she still didn’t know.

The kindness of saving Hermione from the arena, and the brutality of leaving Harry there.

“Well! Every so often, they win, you know. Not always strength and brutality, is it!” The Professor chuckled. 

“We missed out on Hamish that way. Some worried we would miss you too, but I thought not. You were too hindered by your friends. I was right, as I generally am. We gave you the antidote to that nasty poison after we had recovered your body. We treated your malaria. You’re fixed! Good as new. Better even, we fixed your teeth and your hair. We don’t accept ugly scientists here! Well, now, don’t look like that. Aren’t you glad to be pretty?”

Hermione didn’t know what to say to any of it.

“We’ll teach you everything you want to know,” he said intensely, sitting forward so suddenly it made Hermione’s head spin.

“Is Harry still alive?” Hermione asked eagerly. Maybe he was. Ron was gone but if only Harry was alive, if they saved him too, then maybe she could survive this. 

“No,” is the curt answer. “The dark haired boy, correct? He’s dead. Made it to the last two, I believe.”

Just like that, Hermione’s only friends were gone.

“When can I go home?” she said quietly. She was clever enough to know what the answer would probably be, but she hoped she was wrong like a child might, the child she was before she was reaped and will never get to be again. 

“You’re not going home.”

She expected it but it still hurt. There was never, ever, kindness in brutality. Why did only those at the sharp edge of the brutality know that? 

“We all sacrifice. Your friends sacrificed their lives in the arena for the glory of their district.”

Hermione didn’t bother to point out they weren’t careers.

“Your parents sacrificed their daughter for the good of Panem. And you will sacrifice your home and your former life to help your people. _All_ people, in the Capitol and in the Districts.”

Hermione thought he had given this speech many times before, to other traumatised children. He was good at it, she noted dispassionately.

“Professor –” Hermione said uncertainly, as he turns to leave so she could rest. He turned expectedly. With an unsteady hand, although she felt no injuries, Hermione quickly sketched a portion of the message she could never solve with her father, the message she thought would be the only trace of her after she had gone.

She felt like if she could only find out what it meant, everything would be all right. There would be some trace of the people she was trying so desperately to find out about. They wouldn’t be forgotten and lost to history.

One day, somebody might try to find out about her existence just as desperately.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?”

Did he know what language it was? Was there a way of finding out? Was it seditious or just a list of market transactions? Of people’s slaves or tomatoes or even a list of children sentenced to die for transgressions they were too young to understand?

The Professor looked closely at the marks, curious like a scientist and so detached Hermione wanted to scream. He had not been kind or comforting. After the ravages of the arena, she had been told her friends were dead and she would never go home to her parents or anything else in her old life. He had treated her like a lab rat, or a tool to be built and trained and wielded. Not a child, not a traumatised survivor.

Hermione had always dreamed of being a scientist, but not like him. 

“No, can’t say I have.”

And like that, her dreams died.

In the next few days, Hermione found out just what her new role was to be. She had expected it to be bad, but it was even worse. 

They wanted her to be a scientist in the Capitol’s labs performing experiments on humans. The wretched of the districts. The orphans and the disabled, young twins torn from their mother’s arms, prisoners who revolted and drunks who had the misfortune to fall asleep in the side streets at night, far away from the safety of the gas lamp posts.

They wanted to use Hermione’s brilliant young mind to mutate and splice, to amputate. 

Hermione knew exactly what they would use her as. A weapon, against the people. Against her people.

Hermione would not be conducting the experiments yet; she would be an assistant for six years and only when she was old enough to not die in the arena would she be permitted to have control of the experiments.

They all talked of it as an honour, like something good she had to work towards and look forward to. She wouldn’t be a Capitol citizen, but she wouldn’t be a child of the districts either. Something in between. Above it all. 

Really, a bastard, unwanted and unaccepted by either. Neutral and impartial, working for pure scientific reasons. Rerum cognoscere causas.

The scientists of the Capitol held so much knowledge that they were forbidden from having children for fear they will groom their children to take over and begin a dynasty to challenge the Emperor. At twelve, Hermione hadn’t really considered children but the fact that they would take the choice away from her was upsetting.

There was an ever steady supply of brilliant young minds from the districts from quite undistinctive families so there was no need for eugenics and breeding of the scientists: the Capitol did extensive experiments and discovered genetics meant almost nothing for intelligence.

The bright young boys they brought in from the districts are castrated as age thirteen. The girls are given special hormones and unmutilated, but not out of respect. At night, the old Capitol scientists, shorn of their white coats, went into their rooms and conducted experiments on their bodies, as dispassionate with their subjects as they were with the lab mice during the day. 

There was some kind of dispute between the scientists and the Emperor, as if the scientists did not understand how fully they served him, but Hermione didn’t care. She couldn’t. She was twelve and an assistant in a torture chamber working for the greater good. 

Hermione was clever, but she was kind too. Bold. Brave. Clever enough to know that resistance was truly futile, and brave enough to hurt _herself_ with her personal resistance instead of others. 

She injected herself with a dose of poison that would kill her twice over. 

In another world, in another time, a scribe set down the tablet he had been working on. There was no answer to the question he posed, no matter how much he pleaded and entreated God. He could only hope that things will change; hope and pray. The scribe walked out of the shade and into the scorching sun, his tablet left to set, and to be read by all who could understand it.

 

_People revere the words of the influential, even known murderers,_

_but revile the penniless who did nothing wrong._

_They champion the apostate whose “justice” is abomination_

_but exile the just who obey the gods’ commands._

_They fill the wrongdoer’s treasury with gold coin_

_but strip every provision from the grain bins of the poor._

_They bolster the leader who is guilty to his core_

_but destroy the helpless and trample the weak._

_So here I am, disempowered, while the elite torment me._

 

That year a rampaging army stormed through the settlement; fire grew; the tablet hardened, and, by accident, the words were preserved for all of eternity. They were found centuries later in a very different world by a curious gentleman who wanted to understand the battles of the past even as he died in the war of his time.

And time marched on, ever kind and ever brutal, as children fought the battles of their parents and their parents the battles of their grandparents, and all paid for the blood of their ancestors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit to Taylor Swift for the song lyrics and to Slightly Alive Translations for the Akkadian translation: 
> 
> http://mostlydeadlanguages.tumblr.com/post/145122509273/the-babylonian-theodicy-lines-243-297


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